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Paul Solomon Lectures
Emotions
WORKING WITH NINE-STEP PROCESS FOR MASTERING EMOTIONS AN EXAMPLE SITUATION: A mother relates the following story: "My son just graduated from high school and didn't have a date for the prom. A girl asked him if he had a date. He said, "Yes, I do, but my date is sick." The young girl turned to him and said, "Well, you are so ugly. I can' imagine why anybody would want to go to the prom with you anyway." The mother is putting her emotional reaction through the Nine-Step Process. STEP 1. RECOGNIZE YOU ARE BEING EMOTIONAL Guide: The child has described to you a situation in which he felt victimized by someone else's remark. When you heard that, you felt compassion for the child. Where does that express in your body? Mother: I felt my facial muscles tighten and there was a tingling feeling in the solar plexus area. After a few moments my shoulder muscles tightened. STEP 2. LABEL THE EMOTION NEGATIVELY
Mother: I am reacting to this as if my son were a genuine victim. My reaction is teaching him that we are all victims in this universe. My reaction is one of believing that I am impotent and helpless in this situation and probably that he is, too. The emotions were affirming a faith in evil (fear), and of denying responsibility for my feelings (hurt) STEP 3. ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR EMOTION
Mother: I have a number of choices in how to respond. The one I chose was based on fear. I take responsibility for my emotion. STEP 4. IDENTIFY THE CATALYST
Mother: M yson telling his story. Guide: In this case the catalyst was not what the little girl said to her son, but his telling of the story to his mother. She would never have been affected by what was done unless he had told it to her. STEP 5. Guide: Mother: IDENTIFY THE CAUSE Remember, the cause is always one or more beliefs. The cause of my reactions are two beliefs:
1. I am impotent in a situation in which words that are powerful enough to hurt have been aimed at my child. 2. I believed that my child was impotent in the situation.
2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation
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STEP 6.
ISTHE BELIEF VALID? D O ESITSERV E YOU?
Mother: The belief is not valid at all. They are not serving my child or myself in this situation. They have caused a reaction of fear on my part. Guide: First is the belief that the little girl saying such a thing to her son can hurt him. If the mother holds a belief that I can hurt, he is going to respond with deep hurt. Obviously he has responded in that way because he is pouring out his hurt to his mother. That is his belief as well. If the mother reinforces this belief by saying, "Yes, that is a terrible thing, and yes, I understand why it has caused you deep hurt and, that sort of thing does have the ability to cause you deep hurt, then the mother has reinforced an invalid belief that herson holds. STEP 7 IDENTIFY THE CARROT
Mother: There are probably two carrots to my having an emotional response. One, is that I want him to know that I love him and two, I want to show him that love by being as deeply hurt as he is. When he is hurt, that hurt is something to be shared in the family. Guide: It may seem like a strange carrot that says it is good to come to your mother when you are hurt because it makes her feel useful. In fact, a mother can even take pride at being hurt at an outrageous situation happening to her child. It provides an opportunity to express love, which, when you look at it, is an irrational belief and an irrational carrot. STEP 8 DID YOU GET YOUR CARROT?
Guide: W hatw asthe cause/effect relationship? Did you get yourcarrot? Mother: Itse e m slike itd id . Guide: Do you really want that carrot? Do you want to be a person to whom he can come when he is hurt to be nursed, or do you want to reinforce his strength so he doesn't need to come to you? That can be a real dilemma for a mother. Do you want to reinforce the son's belief that he is a victim so that he will always come when he is hurt or do you want to change your carrot so that if that particular situation ever happens to him again, you wouldn't even know about it? STEP 9. NEW RESPONSE
Guide: What would be a better response? Mother: I don't want to teach him to be a victim, but I really don't know how I could respond more appropriately. Guide: First, here is a girl who obviously was hoping for a date, a girl who was hurting inside and was forcing herself to overcome her hurt. She pushed herself to hint to a young man that she was available by asking if he had a date. When he said he did, but the date was not coming the girl felt rejected, hurt, and embarrassed, so she lashed out. She had to say that for her own pride. If he could have realized that what she said had nothing to do with his looks, and as a matter of fact, she paid him quite a compliment. He could be helped to see that there was no need for his feelings to be hurt at all. It should have been the opposite. His manhood, his pride, his self-confidence should have been reinforced by what that girl did. At the same time, it gave him the opportunity to be a healer for a girl who was hurting, for him and for her. The appropriate response was compassion for the girl, rather than hurt for
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her son. When you first begin to do the Nine-Step Process, it might take a bit longer to work out your beliefs and your carrots, you will soon be able to see through your own negative emotions to the beliefs that are causing them just as quickly as in the above process. Once this is accomplished, you will soon be able to go directly from Step I to Step 9.
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Emotions
A LOOK AT SELF TALK One of the best ways to find out our beliefs is to look at our self Talk. There is a conversation going on in our minds. We all talk to ourselves. We are thinking beings and we talk because we think. We think not only in words but in concepts, images and ideas. There is more than one voice in this conversation. We are more than robots. Our self talk is more than just a matter of stimulus and response. We discuss, debate, we examine, consider, even argue inside of our heads. Our conversation with ourselves determines the quality of our lives and sometimes we are even unaware of what we are saying. Are we bombarding our consciousness with supportive, loving, positive, thoughts consistently, or are we undermining ourselves with putdowns, insults and guilt producing statements that would infuriate us coming from another person? What we are saying makes the difference between being happy or sad, excited or indifferent, confident or timid, supportive or unsupportive to others, filled with love or with fear. Our self talk affects the focus of our lives, our relationships and even our health. We do not always recognize our own self talk for two reasons. First, we speak aloud at an average rate of 150 to 200 words per minute, while there is evidence that we think at a rate of up to 3,000 words concepts and ideas per minute. That is far in excess of what we can verbalize, much less consciously decide. It is almost frightening to think that these thoughts are going on in our head faster than we can consciously control them. Much of these unconscious thoughts are a result of our innate survival mechanism. Our bodies and minds respond to all of the stimulus around us, including textures and temperatures, visual images of everything surrounding us - colors, shapes, smells, sounds and tastes. Our responses are learned or remembered and are pre-programmed from early childhood experience. There is so much input inundating our brain, even in this moment, that if we had to be aware of all of it, we probably couldn't cope. This suggests that something or someone beyond our conscious self controls our mind by feeding us information, suggested reactions and even conclusions more quickly than we can censor or control them. The concept of a "survival mechanism" which can respond to threat or environmental stimuli without conscious participation is not new. Neither is the concept of "pre-programming" our minds to respond in particular ways to specific stimuli. We have been told that our fears and emotional reactions are largely a result of "conditioning" and of beliefs that we hold in our subconscious mind. It is widely recognized that a great deal of time and energy of our developing years is spent in a learningprogramming process of discovering ways to respond to particular kinds of stimuli, and in practicing these responses until they become "automatic." These automatic reactions may then become life saving "survival mechanisms." They may also become frustrating, emotional or physical reactions or thinking habits which seem beyond control and may require years ofth erapyto rehabilitate.
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It is not unusual to encounter 'good' people engaged in a furious effort to stop thinking the way they think and to stop acting and reacting as they do. To all of us who have been motivated to "self improvement" the process is familiar. After a myriad of attempts to find out what is causing us to undermine our own attempts at success, joy, unconditional love, relationships and health, we find that what we feel is not really the result of what happens to us, but is the result of what we tell ourselves about what happens. The truth of that is very obvious and is even confirmed by the Bible. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he," (Proverbs 23:7) How can we change our beliefs? Trying to cancel our negative beliefs and self image by telling ourselves the opposite of what we believe will only start an argument. It is said that telling a negative thinker that he should think positively will not produce a positive thinker -- it will produce a negative thinker who feels guilty. TO TELLTH ETRU TH We can change our negative beliefs by telling ourselves the truth. Negative destructive and self-critical beliefs will not stand the test oftruth. For example, when we hear ourselves saying, "This person always tries to make me feel wrong" (and most of us have at one time or another). We can examine first whether we believe that or not. "Is this person really trying to make us feel wrong? Even if this person is trying to make us feel wrong, does he have the power to do so? If he is trying to make us feel wrong, what does that say about his values about himself? Why would he need to make anyone feel wrong? Now, we could go to the opposite pole and say, "This person, all people, want what is best for me. They believe I am right and support me in all things." This does not appear to be the truth either. And even if it is - and It may in fact, be - we may not be able to believe it. The trust is usually somewhere in between. "No one is unkind unless he is in pain. If he cannot support me, he is not supporting himself. I can still love him and support him. I can get all ofthe support I need because I support me." BINARY AND ANALOG Binary and analog are terms from computer technology. The word "binary" means a language which consists of only two words or characters, "on" and "off." It either switches on or off and there's nothing in between. If it's on, then the circuit flows, but it will only register an "on" point and an "off" point. We can program a digital computer for any point in between, but it will not register the entire curve. An 'analog' computer, on the other hand, will register the entire curve. It works not by switching on and off, but by a modulation between on and off, so it has a beginning point and a peak point, and it considers everything in between. Because an analog computer can serve all o fth e data in between, it can accommodate anything you ask, not just on or off, yes or not, right or wrong, good or evil. When we think in the manner of a digital computer, we only consider two possibilities. Either the person supports me or he doesn't, either we are smart or stupid, either we can do the job or we can't. When we think in this binary manner, we burn out or run contrary to what is, and that eventually knocks us out. We can consider all ofthe possibilities in between and everything beyond. Our minds can accommodate all of the possibilities because we live in an analog world. It is not a digital binary world, but an analog
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world. If we cannot accommodate all of the possibilities, then life works against us. We switch on and off. We think of only two possibilities and lose all that is beyond the curve. When we discover our self talk, we see the limitations in our thinking pattern. When we see our thinking is limited, we tend to switch to the other side and discover that the other side is not true either. Digital, binary thinking in an analog world does not lead to truth. One extreme is not true and the other extreme is not true. Maybe somewhere in between them is the truth and maybe somewhere beyond them is the truth. LIFE ISAN ANALOG When we are willing to look at what is and be alright with what is, then our mind can go beyond digital thinking into analog thinking. Machines and all mechanisms work on a binary basis. Life is an analog. When we use digital, binary thinking in our lives, we are reducing our experiences and possibilities of our lives into the limitations of a machine. The analog is not necessarily a point between the two poles. It is not a compromise. It is beyond either one. We don't have to be stupid if we're not smart, and we don't have to be smart to not be stupid. We are not either one. We are all possibilities of the expression of intelligence, and that is more than either of the two poles, and it is more than a compromise between. We are not being supported or unsupported. We receive all possibilities of support from ourselves and from the capacity of others to be supportive. And so it is with almost all of our self-talk statements. We don't have to slip from one side to the other. We can accommodate all of the possibilities. That is the nature of our lives, our intelligence, and it is the nature ofthe Source of our intelligence. If we look at our own self-talk, we can find what we have been saying to ourselves about our past and our future, about our relationships, about our careers, our goals and our opportunities. If we find that our self-talk devalues, takes away from the value of any of those things, then our self-talk is not the truth. If we learn the truth, the truth will set us free. The truth allows us to see things as they are, without coloration, without opinion. LOVE IS THE KEY The key to changing our self-talk is the use of love as the basis. Only two powers exist. One Source empowers life and all that supports life and living. The other empowers lack, limitation, judgment and death. The truth supports "what is," and supports our ability to cope with "what is." "Untruth" interprets "what is" and assigns fantasies called "fear". "Fear" is a statement of faith in evil." Some people believe in "fear". It is sometimes considered smart to "fear" because, it is believed, "fear" protects us. The truth is that "fear" weakens and paralyzes. "Respect" protects us and "respect" is a result of discovering truth. "Fear" instructs avoidance. Love or Truth will instruct us to know, to examine, to be informed, to approach rather than avoid, to build strength rather than weakness. When we change our thoughts to loving, supportive thoughts, we change our minds. When we change our minds, we change our lives.
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Emotions
CALL IT WHAT IT IS Mastering our emotions, then, is a matter of reprogramming our computers and changing our minds. Once we have recognized that emotions are not something that happen to us, but are rather choices that we make, we are ready to take the next step. The next step is deciding to make other choices. Decision is a combination of thought and action. As we sit and read this book, we can make a decision to move our arm, but the decision is not complete. When it is the arm will move. Decision is calling on the energy within us to respond in a different way to a pattern that we have set up. When we act upon the pattern, it is a decision. It is a release of energy to produce a result that we have selected. So, too, with emotions. Our venting of emotions through words, facial expressions, the movements of muscles, is a communication of emotion. What we call "emotions", in fact, are not emotions at all. They are communications of emotion. GOAL ORIENTED COMMUNICATIONS What we call our emotions are devices through which we communicate to other people in order to get their responses. Even before we can walk we learn that by projecting particular emotions or feelings through our physical body, we get responses to our wants and needs from the world around us. The physical communication of emotion is a communications device. The look of anger is not anger itself, it is the expression of anger. The sounds and words we release through the physical are not the emotion, they are a result of the emotion. The emotion itself is contained within a belief system which says, "I have this particular need and through the communication of that need I may be able to get it fulfilled." When we habitually communicate a need through a movement of muscles, it becomes a pattern or a program and we begin to associate that communication with the need for the rest of our lives. The result is something which we call "automatic emotions." They pop up and we express them through our face and body before we know that we are even having them. They happen in a split second. The pattern for the emotion and the expression or communication of that emotion, then, are not the same. BREAKING THE CYCLE It is observable that if we communicate the emotion we begin to feel it. Even if it didn't arise from our belief system, it will impose itself upon our belief system. There are three stages in this cycle: The belief system which we have created. The communication of emotion, and a result of that communication which is a reinforcement of the pattern. It is like a wheel. It goes from pattern to expression to reinforcing pattern to expression to reinforcing pattern. To change our emotional construct, we have to break that cycle. That is done by deciding to feel a different emotion in response to a particular stimuli, not pretending, but by making different decisions. The completeness of the decision is what determines the extent of repatterning. A complete decision will produce transformation.
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We are not putting a value judgment on which decision is made. None of these decisions are right or wrong. We are talking rather about what serves us and what does not. Of course, once we examine it, it may seem rather foolish to make decisions that cause our muscles to tighten, our faces to become lined and constricted, our bodies to build symptoms ranging from arthritis and heart disease, to cancer, but it is not wrong; it is simply choice and we must live with the result of our choices. Contrary to our modern psychologists, we are looking at suppression as a viable option, at least temporarily. Fifty years ago, suppression was a way of life and now in this day and age it is seen as detrimental. Those are two binaries and neither one of them is truth. Suppression is an appropriate device if we want to use it and it may serve us if it is used responsibly. We know that energy is going to come up again at a later time and we can suppress it in the moment with a willingness to deal with it later. The decision not to slam doors and yell while we figure out our option or do our Nine Step Process to change our beliefs may even be the most serving response. We can brush aside the emotion and put the energy into something more constructive for the moment. This is not even necessarily suppression. We may have just put the emotion on hold to deal with it at a more appropriate time, under more appropriate circumstances. BUT WHAT ABOUT FEARFUL THINGS IN THE WORLD? We can use all ofthe rationalization we choose to keep old beliefs that are not serving us, but the choice still is up to you. For example, we may say, "There are nuclear bombs in the world. I don't want to be afraid ofthem , but still I am." What we can recognize is that there is not a nuclear bomb going off in our environment right now and fearing it is creating nuclear bombs that don't actually exist. They are a result of our fear. What we can decide to do is enjoy this room in this moment, which is free of nuclear bombs. And if a blast goes off, we still don't have to fear it. We have to find an appropriate action, if there is one available. Even if we are killed by a nuclear blast in the future, it is not going to do us any good right now to fear it. The fear will only drain us of the joy we can have now in our experience of life in this moment. FROM FEAR TO LOVE In order to make this Nine Step Process for Mastering Emotions work for you, there are two pre requisites. First, you have to want to be a decider. The second pre-requisite is a question of your values. If you hold as a top priority in your life to be in charge of your life and what you feel, those decisions will be a result of that value. Changing our whole system of values is called 'transformation', being born again, accepting love. It means recognizing that every decision, emotion, feeling or thought that we will ever have, every stimulus that we will ever experience, is an expression of either love or fear. That includes every thought, action, or motivation. Unfortunately, most people have chosen as the very basis of their belief system that fear is necessary and essential. If you have enough fear you will behave properly and get the things you need. If you believe in fear as a power to provide for life, then your actions and motivations will be dictated by fear. It is called making fear the lord of your life. Your actions are a response to worshipping fear.
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If love rules your life, love being the support of life, as it is, you support yourself as you are. You no longer wish you were different than you are but support who and what you are. If you will give yourself love as a life support system and really believe that love will fulfill you, then you can make a switch of allegiance from fear to love. The transition from fear to love produces transformation. You are either ruled in life by what you don't have or by what you do have. If you are ruled by what you don't have, you are ruled by desire, lack, limitation and fear and you suffer. Fear motivates you and is the stimulus for everything that you do. It runs your life. If you are ruled by what you do have, then you are ruled by love and you are happy. The decision then, that will make the Nine-Step Process work for you, is the decision to be ruled by Love. It will work for you to the extent that you decide to be ruled by Love. THE NINE-STEP PROCESS Complete transformation of our system ofvalues is our ultimate goal and the Nine-Step Process is a step toward that goal. The transformation from fear to love can happen in an instant, but if you are like most of us you need to have the process complicated sufficiently to understand and work with it. Here are the Nine Steps: STEP ONE: RECOGNIZE YOU ARE BEING EMOTIONAL The First Step in dealing with an emotion is to recognize the fact that you are being emotional, not to recognize the emotion, but the fact that you are being emotional. For example, sometimes a person will be irritable, angry or pouting and someone says, "What's the matter?" You say, "Nothing!" Or you say, "I'm NOT mad!" You can't deal with an emotion if you refuse to recognize it exists. One of those emotions that people very often refuse to recognize is jealousy. People are ashamed of being jealous so they won't admit it if they are. If you do not admit that you are feeling an emotion there is nothing that you can do about it. You are just going to have to experience it. The First Step, then, is to notice that you are not feeling the way you would like to feel. That is really what we are talking about in recognizing the fact that you are being emotional. Recognize the fact that you are not feeling as you would like to feel; that you are not feeling centered, in harmony, joyous. Then notice where this disharmony is expressing in your body. For example, "My neck feels tight." (Is someone a pain in the neck?) "My stomach is churning." (A gut reaction?) "My eye is twitching." (So angry, you can't see straight) "My back aches." (Feeling unsupported?) All negative emotions, without exception, have a point of reference in the body. If you can find that point of reference and are continuing with the same negative emotions, you can be certain that an illness will eventually manifest in that area. It seems like that alone is enough motivation to learn to master your emotions. STEP TWO; LABEL THE EMOTION NEGATVELY This means to simply describe that you are feeling in the most obnoxious and derogatory terms you can possibly think of. This is not to imply that emotions are all negative. All of the emotions, the whole
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range, have a positive counterpart. There is no such thing as an emotion that is useless. It is the way that we experience the emotions, using them inappropriately makes them negative. It is not the emotions themselves. When they are negative, it is important to label them for what they are. For example, instead of saying, "I am angry," you might say, "I am trying to manipulate someone who hasn't done what I want him to do by acting ridiculous and obnoxious". That's what anger usually really is, feeling out of control and trying to manipulate the situation to the way you want it to be and getting someone to do what you want him to do. When you have to admit that is what you are doing, it takes away the acceptability. Label any emotion in a derogatory manner and you'll feel differently about it. For example, "fear". "Fear" is socially acceptable. It's alright to be afraid of almost anything, unless, of course, you are playing the big macho role. So, instead of saying, "I am afraid of that," you say, "I am masochistically entertaining my consciousness with fantasies of that awful thing happening to me and I am creating that dreadful event that hasn't happened yet." This is what "fear" is. "Fear" doesn't exist. There is no such thing as "fear" What "fear" is, is a label for people creating fantasy in their minds and pretending that something is happening to them that is dreadful, having an emotional response to it, poisoning their system, and upsetting their chemical balance. "Fear" is entertaining negative images deliberately. "Fear" is faith in evil. DEPRESSION. Don't say, "I'm depressed". Say, "I am trying to manipulate people around me by withdrawing, looking sad, and requiring of them that they feel differently in my presence, dragging them down into the mire." Take a good look at the emotion that you are feeling and describe it for what it is. Chances are that when you do, you won't need the other Seven Steps. Guilt. Guilt is not something that you should throw out and try never to feel. Guilt is an emotion that can serve you, as can each ofthe emotions. It is another area that psychology is going to have to come to grips with soon. They have put 'guilt' in the position of a whipping boy, and there are people all over the world, psychologists, new age teachers, seminar leaders, saying that 'guilt' is an absolutely useless emotion! You should never experience it, they say. In the first place, their premise is not practical. 'Guilt' is something that you will, in fact, feel even if you decide not to and 'guilt' is an emotion that you should feel on occasion because it can serve you. However, 'guilt' is one of the most misused emotions of them all. Its purpose is to serve as a tool for recognition. When you have done something that does not serve your best interest, 'guilt' is an emotion that labels that as being not in your best interest. That is what 'guilt' is for. As soon as 'guilt' delivers its message it is finished. The second that it causes you to recognize what you need to look at, it is finished. It is a messenger, a point of reference, a point of identification. That's all. What most people do with 'guilt' is to try to use it as a purification device, as punishment. When they feel it, they cling to it and punish themselves by beating themselves over the head, believing that it will make them less guilty and will make up for what they've done. That is the inappropriate use of 'guilt'. Don't use 'guilt' to punish yourself, use it as a point of recognition. As soon as 'guilt' has told you that what you did was inappropriate, it is finished. Dismiss it and send it on its way. Don't cling to it another second.
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People who don't know how to deal with 'guilt' don't recognize it. They deny it. That doesn't work either. The 'guilt' is felt anyway and it manifests in some way through the body or through the life. Anyone who misuses 'guilt' is going to be taught by it eventually. It may take them a number of lifetimes. The negative definition to use for 'guilt' is, "indulging in concern over past situation in order to avoid taking action now." Holding on to 'guilt' will assure one thing; that you will do the same thing again. Jealousy. What is jealousy? What are you doing when you are feeling jealous? First of all, you are making a statement of your belief in your inferiority to a competitor. You are describing the fact to that person you want to impress that you are inferior to someone else. The very fact that you are feeling jealous is a statement ofthat. You are saying to the person who you really want to impress, "I'm inferior to that other person, therefore I am feeling insecure because you are giving that person attention". That makes me insecure because I know that he is more than I am, and if you give him very much attention, then you'll notice that. Then I'll be in a world of trouble!" Jealousy is a statement of inferiority. If you look at it that way and describe it that way, then perhaps you will recognize how inappropriate your action is. Describing your emotion for what it is can be hard because chances are when you are there you tend to believe you have a right to be there. For example, if someone has insulted your family, you do have the right to become angry. But think of it another way. You have a right to poison your system, right on cue, because another person said what he said. You have a right to be a slave - jumping through the hoop at the command of someone who is being unkind. Sure, you have a right to do all of those things. You have become a victim and a slave and what have you gained? Take a look at what the emotion really is. If you are angry because someone insulted your family, then what you are really doing is reacting to the fact that the other person is not behaving as you would like him to behave. Therefore, you are going to use an overpowering emotion called "anger" to try to manipulate him into restating his views otherwise. When you fully recognize that emotion is not something that happens to you, but is something that you do for a purpose, you will just stop doing your emotions that do not serve you. STEP THREE. ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE EMOTION. Don't make somebody else responsible for what you are feeling. Now, even while you are feeling, for example, jealous, which means making a negative statement about yourself, recognizing your inferiority to a competitor, you are saying, "She made me jealous by flirting with him." Taking responsibility for your emotions you would say, "I decided to feel jealousy in response to what she was doing." Taking responsibility means recognizing that the emotion did not happen to you, but you decided to do it, did it, and are doing it now. To take responsibility for your emotions requires some changes of beliefs and it may be difficult to do because we have been taught that emotion is something that happens to us. We can't help it. Your challenge is to make this Step a new belief in your life. Once this Step does become your belief, you will be able to go from Step One to Step Nine of the Nine Step Process automatically. You will recognize when you feel an emotion that it is something you decided to do and you will be totally in control of whether you do it or not. Your belief system will be reconstructed.
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STEP FOUR; IDENTIFY THE CATALYST The catalyst is what you have probably been calling the cause. Identify what you thought caused you to feel the emotion. You have now identified the catalyst. In other words, if your wife, flirting with another man was your excuse for feeling jealous, then that was your catalyst. It is not the cause. STEP FIVE; IDENTIFY THE CAUSE The cause was your belief. In the case of jealousy, the cause of your jealousy may be a belief that not to act jealous when your wife flirts with another man is dishonorable. It is a common, ridiculous belief in our society. The cause of your jealousy was not the fact that she flirted, that couldn't cause anything. That has no effect upon you unless you hold a belief about it. But if you hold a belief that that dishonors your manhood, then that belief cause you to feel jealousy. All emotion, especially negative emotion, comes as a result of beliefs that you hold. The cause of your emotion is your belief and if you want to change the emotion, you need only change the belief about it. When you change what you believe about your wife flirting with someone else, then you will change your response to flirtation. You can change it to something that follows your new belief. STEP SIX: IS YOUR BELIEF VALID? D O ESITSERV E YOU? The belief that caused your emotional reaction, may, in fact, be valid. If it is a valid belief, you will want to keep it and perhaps keep the emotional response that follows it. Examine the validity of the belief that caused your emotional reaction. You will almost always find that the belief is invalid. Most beliefs that cause negative emotions in our culture are based purely on protocol, inappropriate beliefs that go on in our culture, little things that are supposed to matter and don't really. If you determine your belief to be valid, the next question you will want to ask is, "Does this belief serve me?" You may still want to affirm that it is valid that, "It is dishonorable not to be jealous if my wife flirts with another man," but does it serve you? Do you want to keep it? Does this belief bring more joy into my life and into the lives of those around me? If no, you probably will want to decide to replace it. STEP SEVEN; IDENTIFY THE CARROT Here you are identifying what you hoped the emotion would accomplish (as in the image of a donkey led by a carrot). In the case of jealousy, if your wife has flirted with someone else and you responded with anger, then what you hoped to get as your carrot was to have her pay attention to you instead of that other person. Perhaps your carrot also was to intimidate the other person. STEP EIGHT; DID YOU GET YOUR CARROT? This Step is the establishment of the cause/effect relationship of your emotion. We do this in two ways. First ask, "Did this emotion get me my carrot? If not, what were the effects of your emotion? If, in fact, your wife was speaking with another man in a manner that you interpreted as flirtatious, which she probably didn't see that way at all, and you lose your temper, stomp your feet and drag her away, it is highly unlikely that you would get the above carrot. You probably would get her attention, but in a derogatory manner. She probably will become angry, intimidated, and insulted that you even
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thought she was flirting. It probably will accomplish all of the things that you didn't want it to accomplish in your relationship with her. STEP NINE As far as intimidating the other man, it will probably only cause him to realize how insecure you are in your relationship with her. This may even cause him to believe that there is a problem in your marriage and he does possibly have a chance with her. If you really look at the carrot that comes from negative or uncontrolled emotion, you will find that it almost always accomplishes exactly the opposite of what it was designed to accomplish. Most negative emotions backfire. Rarely do they ever accomplish the carrot. You might, however, insist that your emotion did accomplish what you wanted it to accomplish (especially if you still are being emotional about the situation). You may say that your emotional response did first separate her from the man with whom you believed she was flirting, and that it did get you attention from her, although negative, (before she wasn't even around you), and it also showed her how you would respond in those kinds of situations, that you just wouldn't put up with it. If you find yourself still going after a negative carrot, ask yourself this. Do you want to get attention from someone you love by deliberately making his or her life more miserable? Does your belief system give you permission to hurt another person if you believe he or she hurt you? Do you want to be a person who brings more pain into the world? When looked at a bit more honestly, your response - when not clouded by an emotional charge - will undoubtedly be that you did not get your carrot. STEP NINE: NEW RESPONSE There are several possibilities for a new response. One is to change your belief structure to the point that you are not affected if your wife flirts with another man. That is one possibility and one you do not want to ignore. The new response may be to do nothing - if your belief structure is changed, you will look at the incident entirely differently -- but it does not have to be. By suggesting that you change your emotions that are not serving you, we are not suggesting that you change from being a strong, highly passionate assertive person into a Casper Milktoast or, in more modern terminology, a wimp. That is binary and will not serve either. We are suggesting that you stop being a victim; that you make your decisions on purpose. A new response in this situation could be to walk over to your wife and the other man, unemotionally, with an air of calm confidence and mature assurance. That will be effective for both you and them. First of all, it is guaranteed to intimidate the other man if you are confident and not threatened emotionally. And, as far as getting your wife's attention, it is very likely that it was exactly what she was trying to accomplish when she flirted with him in the first place - to get you to be calm, mature and attentive, without being angry and losing your temper. There are always several possible decisions that would be effective. It is important that you find what will work for you.
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USING THE NINE-STEP PROCESS Of course, when an emotion is happening, it feels very powerful, We have experienced so many times being overcome by our emotions that it may be difficult at first to believe that something could work in such a calculated way in a rational process such as this. What, in fact, does actually happen when you start to apply the Nine-Step Process to your emotions? The first time that you try to apply this process, when you are having a strong emotional reaction, it may not work right then. It may not be important that it does. What is important is that after you experience that emotion, you look at everything about the situation and its results and then take it through the Nine-Step Process. The Process does not necessarily have to happen while you are experiencing the emotion. It is probably better done, at first, after you experience the emotion so that you see what you have just done and how absurd it was. You can be absolutely certain that after you have examined your response and have seen a new way to handle it, that you will have the opportunity to face the situation again, probably within the next 24 hours. You have had a challenge and you have experienced it emotionally. Maybe you blew it. You have put it through the Nine-Step Process and you have seen a more appropriate way to respond. You have determined, "This time I will not react." Then the situation hits you smack in the face and before you even have a conscious thought, you blow up again. Don't be surprised if that happens. You almost certainly still will feel automatically an emotional response because you have spent so much of your life experiencing emotions involuntarily. They have been assigned to particular areas of your life. The ability to change your relationship to emotions will come gradually. The next time that situations come, with the same people or with others, you are going to know while the emotion is happening that it is something you already have processed. You are going to realize that you had made a decision to respond a new way and you are going to try that new way. You may have some moderate success, you may have no success, or you could be totally successful. Whichever one is not important at the moment. It is only important that you have come a little closer to taking voluntary control of how you feel, to understanding your emotions and to making a decision that will serve you.
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Emotions
DIVINE SELFISHNESS The brain mind has two concerns - survival and self importance. The left hemisphere is said to be logical; the right hemisphere intuitive and imaginative, and the brain stem instinctual. What empowers all three is the Source of Life Itself, and It has a purpose greater than is expressed in the single body. There is an individual purpose and a greater purpose. The individual purpose of each soul, without exception, is mastery of the laws of this plane. The greater purpose is the survival of all that is created in thisuniverse. Itcan be called the "Great Idea". It is Life itself. Our brain mind separates the two and believing they are different and in conflict, begins to compete with the world, with God, and with the purpose of life, creating disharmony within ourselves and our environment. Our brain mind believes it has to in order to survive. Enlightenment comes when this brain mind has its sense of importance satisfied. When the brain mind is not trying to ensure its survival, when it is alright with itself, when it has found its importance in harmony with the greater importance, enlightenment comes. Personal purpose is recognized to be in harmony with greater purpose. AN ANCIENT STORY There is a story among the ancients that is the very early formation of our planet, in the earliest expression of man, there was a time when individuals became increasingly conscious of their separation from one another. Being conscious of separation brought the effect of competition. Competition cannot occur except in the mind of a person who has perceived a feeling or an illusion of limitedness, a sense of separation. If resources are limitless there is not competition because there isn't anything to compete for. At the moment that the concept of competition entered the consciousness of the planet, according to the ancients, roses grew thorns and bees grew stingers. The plant and animal kingdoms took on defenses which were the expression of mankind's participation in the energy of fear as opposed to the energy of love; the belief in lack and limitation as opposed to the expression of plenty and limitless resources. Ever since that time the entire human race has sought to retain its link with the greater purpose. The quest itself has not always been conscious, known to many only through a vague questioning in the back of the mind, "Why am I here? There must be a purpose, a meaning to life." Yet the same story of a search has been told throughout the world in myth, legend, and Sacred Scripture. It is the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table in Britain, the twelve Olympian gods and goddesses and the twelve challenges of Hercules in ancient Greece and Rome, the life of Lao Tse in China, of the Buddha in India, of Quexicotal in South America, of the Hebraic Patriarch, the life of Jesus, and many more.
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We are here to become Masters, to learn to tap the power of the Universe, to so completely experience and express love that there is a confidence established in the individual that makes him or her invulnerable. For you and me it can be called the Search for Alrightness. If an individual has sufficient love, he has what is most needed for survival. All other things are subject to it. If a person understands the energy of love then he understands that it is the energy of growth, expansiveness, the source of all resources in the universe. If you feel sufficiently loved by yourself and your Source, you know you have everything you need for your survival, growth and alrightness. If you do not have sufficient love for yourself from yourself and your Source, you will perceive a lack. You will seek to meet that lack through competition, through taking from the environment and from other individuals. You will seek the appreciation, alrightness, approval that you need to survive from other people. In fact, you will insist on getting it from other people. But if you don't have it, if you have not provided it to yourself, you will perceive that you are not able to get it from other people or from your Source. Every argument, without exception, that occurs on the planet occurs because someone feels insecure. They are participating in the energy of fear, and it is greater in them at the moment than the energy of love. This is the way everyone who is not a Master lives. A PARADOX Our religious background in most cases didn't help. We were, in fact, inundated with the image of ourselves as guilty, rotten sinners who had to apologize to God and ask Him to forgive us. Most of us were told from childhood that we should love other people more than ourselves. "Love everybody else". "Do things for other people". As a result, we use other people's impression of us as a criteria for our own alrightness. The only times we are successful at doing anything are when we are doing something for someone else. Actually, your first response to this discovery might appear selfish. "It's time to do something for me for a change!" Here's the paradox. When you start doing things for yourself, you will find you care for other people more. You will no longer be doing things just to get other people's attention or to please them. You will be doing things because you want to, not because you want to get something from others. When you are doing things for yourself, it does not mean you have to do things against others. If you are alright. If you are fulfilled, you will think of others. You will be generous. It is the opposite of selfishness. You will have sufficient regard for yourself and you will perceive that you have the love, approval, alrightness, the statements that you matter, consistently from yourself and from your Source. You will not have to look for other people as your source of alrightness. If they do not give it to you, you will not perceive a loss in the relationship. You will not attempt to manipulate others to give you what they are obviously incapable of giving. When you have mastered the Law of Love, you have mastered the greatest power in the universe. The Law of Love causes you to feel no limitation, no inadequacy, now fear. There is nothing that you are afraid to handle.
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MASTERY OF EMOTIONS Mastery of the power of emotions is the first step and the Nine-Step Process can by your key. Once you have the key it is only a matter of decision and then practice until your beliefs are restructured. You will no longer be a victim of your emotions - you actually never were. If you find yourself indulging in an emotional response, you will know it is your choice. It is really sad to find someone indulging in an emotional response saying, "I know I don't have to do this, but I think I'll indulge it anyway." That person will have just decided not to be a master, to create some more pain in the world, to make life a little less joyous. The decision to give up the right to react may sound extremely complex and challenging, but it isn't really because it is your basic nature. Not to accomplish it actually takes more effort, but the effort that you make keeps you in dis-ease and dis-harmony. It is a natural result of worshipping fear instead of love. You can stop creating the things that take the joy out of your life any moment you want to. The only thing you have to do is give up the joyless emotions, which is what you want to do anyway. You want to live in joy and harmony. All that you have to do to live in joy and harmony is to give up the things that destroyjoy and harmony. You know what they are; you can see them, feel them know where they come from. You make active decisions. THE GREATER PURPOSE The greater purpose of seeking clarity through the Nine-Step Process and achieve some results with the brain mind - with logic if you are a logical thinker, with imagination or intuition if you are more inclined to use of the right brain, or with the primitive or instinctual brain if you are into processing, digging in and getting in touch with primal origins or emotion Any one of these or any combination will bring fruitful results. If you want to go beyond these tools to the source of them, you will have to go beyond your individual, personal intelligence to what we are calling your SuperConscious Intelligence. Working with the tools will bring intellectual clarity and behavioral modification. Contact with your Source will bring you fulfillment and spiritual growth. This SuperConscious Intelligence is in harmony with the greater purpose and if you make it a conscious part of yourself it will look out for your own selfish interests. If that sounds like another paradox, consider this. Your survival is important. What will keep you from being effective in life is doubting that. ONLY TWO POWERS There are only two powers that you can talk with when you go beyond your brain mind. You can talk with fear or you can talk with love. If your information comes from fear, you will find yourself living in a world filled with fear, hurt, pain, the need for punishment and guilt. When fear speaks, that's the language it uses and it can be a powerful motivating force. Preachers have threatened people with Hell for centuries in order to make them better. That is fear speaking from the mouths of ministers of the devil because the devil is fear. Whatever glorifies fear and uses fear to manipulate is ofthe devil. The opposite of fear is Love. You can get to know Love better by recognizing Love as a being you can talk with. When you start working with the Nine-Step process, begin by establishing a relationship with a friend. You can give your friend a personal name. You can call it SuperConscious, or you can call it the
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Christ, what ever you want to call the embodiment of Love. The embodiment of Love is the embodiment of consciousness that supports life in all people. It is not limited to your own interest. Its interest is the survival of the planet, of the universe, of the expression of God and His idea. It also is dedicated to your survival in a way your brain mind never was, never can be. It is still selfish, or we might change the term to Self-ful. It is Divinely Self-ful. You might say it is alright with self, others and its environment. HOW DO YOU CONTACT YOUR SOURCE? While you are reading this book, there is an intelligence that knows more than your conscious mind knows that is operating inside your own body. If you tried to figure out right now how to move your arm, you would soon realize that you don't know how to do it consciously. The best that you can do is to ask, and you get a result, a response from life. Life is responding to you constantly doing what you ask it to do. You already have contact with your Super-conscious. If you didn't, you couldn't move your body. People who lose contact with their SuperConscious on that level are paralyzed, and when they reconnect with the SuperConscious that operates the body then the paralysis is over and they are miraculously healed. Science takes the credit but science doesn't know how any of it happens. That Intelligence that knows how to move your arm, knows how to replicate calls in your system that make your heart b e a t, knows more about you and your purpose than you know. You can watch results and tabulate them, but there is a spark of life that comes into these experiences of nature and the movement of life that you can't explain. That life, which is capable of moving your organs and your limbs, is with you throughout your life. If you can listen to it, you can get direction in where to go. Getting direction is getting answers. It is a beginning. A greater step is making a link with the consciousness to transform your mind and to think as it thinks. If you can re-unite your consciousness with its Source, then you will have available to you the avenue of information which made it alive. To accomplish that you will have to give the brain mind the importance that it is hungry for. If your mind thinks it is going to get lost in the transformation, it will get scared and make the separation wider. The more fear you have of losing your identity, your personal power, or your sense of importance, the wider the separation of this unit from its source. If, on the other hand, you can realize how important this unit is to its Source, then you can talk with that Source. It means overcoming the fear of the Source of life. It may seem amazing that you have any fear in the first place, but remember that in this culture you have been taught that God gets mad at you for "being bad", so facing your Source can be a lot like facing an angry mommy or daddy. You have awareness of guilt, of failure, feelings of being unwanted, unloved, insecure, ineffective, not alright. The very reasons that you want to know God are the very things that keep you from knowing God. They block your communication with your Source. FROM BELIEF TO REAL - IZING You have to realize - not just believe - but 'real-ize', make real for you that this Source loves you more than you love yourself. When you can believe that, you can listen to it and the communication that you get is not going to be condemning. The Source of who and what you are is not disappointed with what He has made. If you have that kind of confidence in getting in touch with the Source of yourself, then
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you can open all of the channels that keep you closed off in fear that it wouldn't work, that you wouldn't be acceptable, that you wouldn't be forgiven. If you can get past the fear and make a personal friend, then you can start the conversation. When you go through each of the steps of the Nine-Step Process, keep the conversation with your friend going in your mind. Better yet, have a running conversation with Source. If you do, you probably won't need the Nine-Step Process. The Source of your mind is the Source that created your ability to communicate and to have emotions. The creator of your emotions does not have a problem with emotions. TRUTH IS BO RN ATW IN When you feel an unpleasant emotion, one that you know will not serve you, ask your Source, "How can I best respond?" An answer will pop into your head just that quickly. Then on its heels, 'born a twin' is going to come doubt and you will ask, "Was that message correct or am I deluding myself"? The Source of Life is the Source of Truth, and it will tell you the truth anytime that you are willing to listen. It shouldn't be hard to believe that the Creator of this Universe can tell you about the operation of the Universe. There had better be some intelligence up there that know what is going on and if there is, why is it so surprising that it can communicate with you? You are protected from knowing more than you are ready to handle. At any moment that you decide you are willing to handle more information all you have to say to the Source is, "I want to know more. I am willing to take responsibility for knowing more. I would like You to reveal to me what is coming in my Life as a result of what I've set in motion, by my response to the catalyst. What is it I need to do to respond effectively?" Ask and believe that you deserve an answer. Then, when the answer comes and you begin to doubt, stop and be absolutely silent. Stop the activity of the self-talk that goes back and forth; stop the arguing that goes on inside your head; that builds and builds to a point of negative emotion. Truth comes when the argument stops. Stopping the argument is not a matter of force. Force won't work. What happens when you tell children to keep quiet? They get louder. They scream at the top of their lungs when you tell them to be quiet. Instead, give them love. Tell them they are alright. Remember, your brain mind wants two things - it wants to survive and it wants to be important., So tell them they are important, "You are precious to me. T h a tis w h y la m listening." Reassurethem. R eassureyourselfandgiveyourselftheconfidenceand the love. YOU KNOW THE TRUTH When your consciousness becomes quiet, listen. That is when your answers will come. Tell your friend, "I want to know." Truth will come and doubt will come again also on its heels. Say to yourself, "I deserveto know, lam w illingto listen." Then go backto truth. If you are not certain which answer came first, remember that the universe is the creator of life and of your ability to think. It is in the interest of that creative ability to communicate with what it has made.
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For that reason, whenever there is an opening for the universe, for the Source of creative consciousness to talk with you, if you give it any excuses, it will talk. In the final analysis, you know the truth, and you are trying to get everything else out of the way of knowing that truth. Then truth comes. You will recognize it because it will be as if you remember something that you always have known. You don't have to argue with that piece of information. You may not have any logical way of knowing the answer, but you do have an inner sense of knowing. An inner confirmation recognizes truth and when you get that confirmation, you have heard the voice of the Christ. The consistent recognition and acting on that voice is the key to transformation.
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Dreams
THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODS EXERCISE Dreams are the activity of the soul making an entry in the Akashic Record. Your dreams will symbolically present how you handled your experiences ofthe day, their origin from your past, and a determination of your future based on your response. You dream every night. If you do not recall dreaming, it may suggest that you are avoiding dealing with something your subconscious is trying to communicate. As you change your attitude and sense of expectancy, your dreams will become easier to recall. As you become more consciously aware of the lessons you are encountering in life, your dreams will become clearer. When you record and interpret your dreams regularly, you will become much more aware of dreaming. You will develop the ability to control and change your dreams, and will thus be able to change your future. Sleeping On Purpose 1. Place a dream journal and a pen readily available beside your bed. 2. Whenever possible, do your Moving Meditations and Balanced Relaxation. 3. Go through your terraces, into your Temple, and let your Inner Teacher know you want to consciously remember your dream. 4. As you fall asleep, review the events of your day. Interpreting The Language of the Gods 1. Before getting out of bed in the morning, make notes on all of the dreams you remember. If you are awakened by a dream in the middle of the night, write it then. Do not wait until morning, because if you awaken with a dream it is a very important dream and you will probably not remember it in the morning. Record the dream in a relaxed state without attempting to analyze it or interpret it. If you do not rememberyourdream, write in yourJournal, in yourown words, "I knowthat I have dreamed. I want to consciously remember my dreams. I am certain that tomorrow night I will remember." If you still do not remember any dreams the following night, set your alarm clock for the middle of the night, and write down your first impression. If that still does not work, increase the number of times during the night you set your alarm. You will remember.
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2. Give the dream a title. 3. Write in one or two words how you feel about the dream and how you felt in the dream. These may be the same emotions, but do not have to be. I feel good, apprehensive, scolded, confused, etc. Does it give you a feeling of joy, sadness, anger, fear, accomplishment? Did it seem instructive, complimentary or critical? 4. Look for figures of speech, puns etc. that may give the dream a meaning. 5. List any easily recognizable universal symbology. 6. List the prominent words in your dream. When you finish listing the words, take a moment and ask your Inner Teacher to help you interpret your dream. Then, go through the list of words and write down the first thing that comes to mind at each word. Do not try to think this out. Write your first spontaneous thought, even if it does not seem to make any sense. You will find when you read back the dream, replacing the words in your dream with the spontaneous presentation of your unconscious, you will have your interpretation. Everything in your dream is a part of you, and as you work with them regularly, you will begin to build a vocabulary of your personal symbology. 7. Ask the Master within what he is communicating to you in your dream, and write the first thing that comes to mind. 8. Come out of your Temple, down your terraces, and begin your day. 9. If you still do not clearly understand your dream, look for situations during the day that will clarify its meaning. EXAMPLE Dream: I am going to Europe. I am late because I had not figured carefully what time I was to leave so I am feeling rushed. I told someone I was in over my head. I was so rushed I didn't have time to pack properly. I threw things into my suitcase at the last minute. Then I was on the plane, and I couldn't find my ticket. I couldn't figure out how I had gotten on the plane without my ticket. Title: Emotions: Figures of speech: Universal Symbols: Last Minute Journey Overwhelm, Anxiety In Over My Head Airplane - vehicle, my body
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List of key elements:
Europe - foreign land - late - fear - feeling rushed - overwhelmed - packing
preparedness - suitcase - my talents ticket - price of admission Interpretation: I am venturing into an area of uncertainty in my life. I am scared and overwhelmed. I do not feel prepared, and I do not have all the things I need well organized to take the next step. I don't feel ready, and I don't feel confident that will succeed. I don't know how I can possibly get there. Communication to my Master: Dear Master, I know that I need to take the next step in my growth, but I am scared. I don't feel prepared. Please help me do what I need to do to grow. Dear Student, Remember that when you ask, I am there always to help you. You would never take steps in your growth if you waited until you felt ready. You do not reap the results, experience the growth, until you are willing to step out into the void. It is time. It is your decision whether you will do it now or wait until later. Be not afraid, I am with you always. Changing Your Dream 1. If you are not yet consciously dreaming, in the morning, think of ways you can change your dream to a more satisfying, fulfilling, harmonious outcome. In the above example, you could see yourself finding your ticket, your price of admission, sitting comfortably in a seat on the plane, and landing at the airport. If you are conscious of dreaming during the dream itself, you can change the conclusion while still in an altered state.
2.
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Dreams
Dreams and Sleep Preparation

First of all understand about dreams and sleep. An interesting phenomenon in our culture is that we have not been taught how to sleep. Most of us do it by accident. It happens to us. It is not an activity that we do deliberately. We don't prepare ourselves for it. We don't enter into it in specific ways. If any of you are really serious enough about your life to make the effort, you can maintain a continuity of consciousness 24 hours a day, which means that your dreams are going to become lucid dreaming or participation dreaming. The process for doing that, for dreaming deliberately, will have a number of effects on you. One is, you will sleep more effectively. Just your sleep itself will be more healing to the body. Another is that while you are dreaming, you will realize that you are dreaming. It is perfectly possible for you to interpreter the dream while you're dreaming it. It is possible for you to understand the lesson and the instruction of the dream while you're dreaming it. It is possible for you to make decisions and thereby change the outcome ofthe dream, rewriting the Akashic Record and your relationship to it. What you're really saying is that you're claiming the Law of Grace while you are making your analysis of the incident of the day. The effect of that is to change your relationship with the incident. In other words, it's not a pretend thing. It's a real thing. If I handled an incident wrong today in my life, I dream about it tonight. I not only decide I would like to handle that differently. I do handle it differently in my consciousness. In other words, I know that I have developed a different relationship to that person so that in the same circumstances with the same input I would not react in the same way. I have become a person who would and does and is reacting in a new way. So I can change the dream while I'm in it, I change myself by doing that and alter the lesson that is coming up in the future. If I decide in a dream that I have mishandled an incident ofthe day, I will also decide to repeat the conditions of the incident. So you yourself are writing your own future. There is no mystery to predicting the future. You predict the future because you create the future. And you create it by taking the past, adding to it the intent and thought and practice ofth e present and create what's coming up in the future by doing that. The only secret to interpreting the future is to look at the opportunities of the past and how you've acted on them in the present. You'll know that you're going to have to go through it again if you haven't responded to the situation properly. You can either do that with dreams or you can do it with just a rational analysis of your life. All of the incidents that have caused you pain and you didn't take away from them the ability to cause you pain, are incidents that you have coming again.
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Dreams are the Judgment of The Lessons of Life

Tonight, if dreams are the act of a soul making an entry in the Akashic Record, then what will be the entry tonight? The entry tonight will be a judgment of the incidents of today. What that means is when you go to sleep tonight you will read the Captain's Log of your actions today and in each little, separate incident you'll make a judgment about how you responded. And if in the judgment of the highest that is within, if in the judgment of your Higher Self you didn't handle any one single, tiny, little incident well, it will immediately begin to make arrangements for you to meet that incident again. That happens every night of your life. You judge your day and based on that judgment you create your future every night. Your dreams not only predict your future, your dreams create your future. There's a very good reason for getting in touch with your dreaming self. If you begin to cooperate with your dreams to the extent that you can see the unfoldment of what you did today in symbol - you see, as you dream about what you did today you're not going to literally dream "I did this and this and this." That's the objective thing. That's the entry you make in your Journal during the day. So the action and the thought itself makes an objective entry but the judgment entry says, "This is what that action means." You dream it all in symbols. You dream what the symbolic value ofthe act was. Dream researchers who are working with dreams in our day and time have already discovered that dreams of the night are residue of the actions of the day. Even psychologists know that. They just don't know why. Why should we review everything that went on during the day? Why should we take the stress incidents ofthe day and symbolize them at night? Dream researchers say its because we're storing it in our memory. They don't know how close they are to being right. We are storing that incident in our memory with a comment, which ultimately is known as Karma. You are creating your karma at night while you're dreaming. You're making decisions about how to set up karma for the future, how to meet it and every day your future is based on whether you handled the previous day well or not. You can make absolutely certain that anything you didn't handle well today will be set up for you again in the future. But you will set it up. It's you participating in all this. The Lords of Karma who judge your action daily are you. The reason for keeping the Journal is to have the Captain's Log Section to note the incidents of the day, and the Mystery School Section for what the purpose was of those incidents and then the Dream Section brings those two sections together. If you're filling out the dream log every day you're going to get the comment from the highest that is within you on what you did during the day, which will prepare you for the future. There's the reason for remembering your dreams.
Recording Your Dreams

Now, what do you do with the dreams themselves? My suggestion is this. When you begin to work with your dreams first of all record them in outline form. Which means if you write out word for word every thing that was a part of your dream you could be writing from now on. You can go into detail and detail and detail. Outline the dream when you put it down and outline one dream a night only unless there are special nights when two or more dreams seem very, very important. What you want to record is what you feel is the most important dream of the night. The reason for that is because a day is recapped in one
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particular dream that will take care of the symbology of all the rest of the dreams. You dream all night. You go from one dream right into another and so you need not record every one of those. There are too many and they're assessing the whole day anyway, what you need is a recap, an assessment of the whole day in one small chunk that you can work with, a comment about the quality of the day. Everything that needs to be said can be said in a single dream. So record one dream in outline form and note the major characters. Make a list ofthe major characters in the dream - the people, the objects, things that you saw in the dream. For example, even if you saw a wall but there was a picture on the wall you record both the picture and the wall because pictures do not or symbols of any kind do not appear in your dream without a reason. Even the smallest thing that you noticed, you noticed it for a reason. So it's alia part of the structure of the dream. Write down the dream structure in outline form when you wake up in the morning. When you actually go to work with your dream and see what is valuable to you, there are things that you ought to check. The first thing is - read through your Captain's Log before you start to interpret your dream because the dream is always related to the Captain's Log. Whatever went on during the day before you dreamed that night is a part of the dream. Go through your Validations Section for the cast of characters. Then notice your Mystery School lessons because that will tell you emotional incidents ofthe day that have the greatest charge. Having read those three, then read the dream because the dream will comment on those. If you're asking someone who interprets dreams to interpret your dream you can never give them just the dream. You must also give them the Captain's Log, the Validations Section and the Mystery School Section. In the matrix of all of that they should be able to understand the dream. But not one without the other. As a matter of fact you really need the Discoveries Section as well and the Dear Master letter. Because your dream is made up of all that you are and anyone else trying to interpret your dream is at a distinct disadvantage. The only way that it can be done is psychically. So if he's trying to do it logically from rationalization and interpretation of symbols he doesn't have all the input he needs unless he has read the Discoveries Section and all the rest of your Journal. If that isn't filled out even you are not in a good position to interpret your dreams. If you really want to do it with all of your energy and all of your might, if you want to do it right, then by all means use the Journal. Use the whole Journal and when you start working with your dreams know that the Journal is invaluable to interpretation of the dreams. You must know what you've been through in your Discoveries Section as the earlier stages in your life. Once you have that Discoveries Section and understand that and move on to your Captain's Log section and the other sections of your Journal your dreams will become much more alive because the criteria that you need for interpreting them is there. The only thing further that I would say about dreams is that when you initially start working with your dreams find somebody else and let them know what's in your book, let them read your Journal, and get them to work with you in dream interpretation because other people can interpret your dreams better than you can. They will see things in them that you refuse to see. I know that that advice contradicts advice given by some people who work with dreams. There are lots of people who teach dream
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interpretation who say "Never tell your dreams to anybody else, its very private, personal matter. It is an analysis of what's within you," and so on. That's true. But on the other hand to get the truth out of dreams you need somebody else's point of reference to bounce them off of. So choose somebody that you respect and somebody that you don't mind knowing all your deepest, darkest secrets.
The Three stages of Dreams

Dreams seem to come in three stages during the night. The symbology of the dreams early in the night seems to deal with the past. The dreams during the middle portion of the night seem to deal with the present and the last dreams of night seem to deal with the future. So it's a progressive thing. That's fine except that's not all it is. There's another factor I'd like you to consider that Edgar Cayce said. He said you would never, ever, have an important experience in your life without dreaming of it first. Every important event in your life will first appearto you in a dream. Now, supposing tonight you go to bed, you go to sleep and in that sleep you begin to dream of the particular challenge you met today. The first thing your mind will do is say, "Ok, this is the situation we're dealing with. Now I want to take you back to the past, to the roots of this situation. This is where it originated. This is where your first opportunity was to deal with this and this is how you dealt with it then." That's the dream of the past. It will come forward and deal with the same thing in the present. This is the situation you met today and this is what you did with it. This situation ofthe past responded to in this way in the present produces this kind of outcome in the future. You are taking the past, reviewing it karmically, adding to it the present situation and not only predicting your future experiences but creating, causing your future experiences.
Three Levels of Self

Let's see if we can diagram it. Remember we said that there are three levels of Self-the Conscious, the Subconscious and the Superconscious. If we consider that the Superconscious is the God self, that is, this is the Higher Self, this is the origin of myself, this is the part that joins together with the God self of other beings. The collective Superconscious is the nature of God in the world. So it's bigger than me but it is the Highest that is within me. This part of myself, the Higher Self, knows every lesson that I need to meet in my lifetime. The Conscious Self gets all his information from the five senses and so is subject to ego and personality and so on. The Subconscious Self is where I store my symbols, and where my dreaming takes place as it floats to the consciousness. If I learn something within and it becomes a real realization I do not need the outcome ofthe lesson so it makes no difference what I did in a past life at all. If I learn the lesson that I would have learned by having the illness or accident or having a thing happen to me or whatever, then I have become a new person and I need not experience the pattern that I set in motion. That's the Law of Grace. Dreams serve the same purpose, so that I can deal with what I have been in the past, know myself in the present and prepare for the future. If I can listen to myself every night in dreams I will get these things: I will get an analysis of where I am; I will get an idea of where it came from, perhaps a reminder; and I will get a warning about the future, or some instruction in how to react to what I've set in motion, to what's coming.
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Steps in Dream Interpretation

Dreams for most people follow some patterns. The first pattern of interpreting a dream perhaps is to know that symbols are almost always puns or plays on words. You mind will take a play on words and it will go into a thing like "sounds like such and such." So take note what the word itself is or means and also what that word sounds like and then refer it to something else and see what's going on. Sometimes you have to play around quite a bit with the words themselves. You can check for a number of different things. First of all see if it is a pun and then try to think what possible puns would be for the object or the word or the central symbol. If that doesn't work, check for a play on words in other ways and check universal symbols. These are the steps to follow in dream interpretation. Take these steps in this order and it will help considerably. The first thing that you record after you record the dream itself is the feel of the dream, that is, does it feel threatening? Does it feel like a warning? Does it feel like instruction, like classroom teaching? Does it feel like a compliment? Is it complimenting me on the way I handled something? Does it feel as if it's in the future? Does it feel as if it's in the past? Does it feel like its something that I'm going through right now? Ask yourself all these questions. Take the questions one at a time. Ask each one of them. Next, after you've gotten the feel of the dream whether happy or sad, positive or negative, warning, teaching, whatever, the next thing you do is pick out universal symbols. Universal symbols are symbols that are reasonably obvious. For example, animals in a dream are almost always symbols for the animal in man. That means the physical body or the physical appetites, the physical expression in some kind of way, the animal nature in man or the lower self. However, specific animals can have different meanings. Cats, for example, can be symbols for your psychic nature, your mystic nature, your ability to get into dark and mysterious things. Snakes in a dream, serpents, depending on your feeling about snakes, can be symbols of the Kundalini or symbols of wisdom or threatening symbols of Satan and the forces of darkness. You have to ask yourself how did I feel about that snake? Did it feel threatening to me at all? Did it feel evil? Then interpret it in that way. If it did not then see if the wisdom symbol fits it. And if not the wisdom symbol then perhaps the Kundalini force or even the sexual nature. Snakes can be a phallic symbol in a dream. Remember that your Subconscious Mind pays absolutely no attention to conventional morals. the breasts. Your
Subconscious Mind originated further back than our society and doesn't care how our society feels about So you might have a dream of yourself feeding the world at your breasts and your In fact it can get Subconscious Mind is not the slightest bit embarrassed about the symbology.
considerably more sexual than that in symbology and it may not be a sexual dream at all but its the things that sexual dreams portray - regeneration and that sort of thing can be portrayed in a sexual manner in a dream because your dreams do not pay attention to what the commission on pornography says. They deal, in a very straight and honest way, with the facts of life and say it in the most efficient way completely disregarding your social mores.
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Dream Symbol Examples

Cars in a dream - use your common sense and break down symbols this way. A car, obviously, is a vehicle. A vehicle is something that takes me from here to there. What are the most obvious vehicles? A vehicle might be my physical body. It might be a vehicle of expression such as a talent. It is obviously talking about a vehicle, the only thing I have to do now is find out which vehicle it's talking about in my life. If it a bright red car the color is telling me something about my vehicle. Maybe I am vain about my physical appearance if it's a bright red car. Supposing it is a bright red car driving upstream in the middle of a river. The symbols say this: first of all I am in bright red, that is an ego centered, vehicle. It also says I'm going against the tide or against the current. I am also using an inappropriate vehicle for doing so. It should have been a boat. So that dream is telling me all of these things. I'm going against the current in an ego centered, inappropriate vehicle. That dream should tell me some areas of my life that I can work on. Supposing the vehicle is a train instead of a car? A train is a vehicle that I am not likely to occupy by myself so it's saying there are other people in the same train with you. So if you dream about a train going into trouble it may be talking about your whole group consciousness, a club that you're a member of or an organization and so on. It is not likely to be your career because if it were career it would be the locomotive of the train or it would be some work area connected with the train. Supposing it's an airplane? If you're in an airplane and it's a large airliner and lots of other people are on the airliner with you then once again it is saying there are other people in this same situation with you. But what about the airliner itself? Why an airliner and not a train? An airplane says that in some way you are in the air. That can be any one of a number of different things. Think about the play on words. Number one, you're up in the air about this - that means you're over excited or you're emotionally upset or whatever. Number two - you finally got this things off the ground. These are two opposite interpretations for a plane. Number three - the dream may be saying you're flying too high and because you're flying too high you're going to have to come down again. A fourth interpretation might be - you finally got this thing going, you got it flying, you have gotten it airborne but there are people up there with you, if it is a large plane with other seats and so on - if it is a single seat or you're up there by yourself then it's interpretation is about yourself. A boat. A boat usually includes with it water and so the symbol is changed somewhat. A boat is a vehicle for moving through emotional situations as symbolized by the water or through spiritual situations as symbolized by the water. Water symbolizes both spirit and emotion depending on application. Your symbols may be different at different times because of the difference in the way that they're used. But water is usually either emotion or spirit. It can, however, be anything that you're getting into, when you're getting into water over your head, that's all its saying. You're getting into this project over your head, not meaning necessarily emotion nor spirit but whatever projects you're in you're getting in over your head. Or if it's hot water you're getting into hot water about this thing.
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If it is an ocean, the size of it has significance. It is a universal thing. It involves a great deal more than just you if it's an ocean. If it is a river it is likely to be the stream of life. If it is water at a sink it has to do with cleansing. If it is a basin or a bathtub then it's likely to have to do with cleansing. If it is rain or a shower or a storm the rain generally is something freely given, something that you did not deserve, it is given to you freely and that may bring forth fruit. Remember the play on words in the interpretations. A house. Houses in dreams almost always talk about your physical body. It is the house that you're living in and it should be interpreted according to the rooms that you're in. If you're in the basement then guess where your mind is? That's where you're living. You're either in the depths of yourself, which can be the depths of despair, or you are building a foundation, perhaps, or you have your mind where it ought not to be. All of those things are possible interpretations of the basement. The living room of a house, the parlor, is the place in your life where you meet the public. So if a dream takes place in there, the dream is saying this area of your house is where this symbol or whatever I'm telling you about is concentrated. The upstairs is almost always the higher mind. Going into the upstairs of a house means you're graduating into a higher level and those dreams are usually very encouraging. A church in a dream is obviously the spiritual area of life unless a church to you symbolizes judgment and condemnation as it does for some. A death in a dream almost always means the end of a cycle and has little to do with the death of a loved one even if that's what you dreamed in the dream. If you see yourself or someone else in a casket it doesn't necessarily mean anything about that person. It means a death of the part of yourself that that person represents. Steps in Dream Interpretation Cont. Those are just some ideas then of how dream symbology can work. The application of them is more important that the symbol itself, the way that they interact. So, we've given you these steps: you interpret a dream first by the feel of the dream, number two by universal symbology. Number three, by interaction between symbols. The third step is to say, "What is the boat doing to the house or to the water or whatever." You can very often get your symbol by the fact that the boat is moving through the water or the boat is standing still. The action is what it is doing. The fourth step is a gestalt technique. You gestalt the dream. That means you're going to take every symbol in the dream and identify with it. Pretend that you are that symbol. Become that symbol for a moment and say, "I am now the boat. How do I feel about the water? How do I feel about the house? How do I feel about the person dreaming about me?" You can really get some insights into yourself by becoming your symbol and looking at yourself rather than being yourself and looking at your symbol. Get into the action of the dream and say, "what's going on here, how do I feel about these other things?" This way you can get other ideas about the dream. After all of these things if you still don't understand your dream then meditate. With the work that you have already done go back through the dream and simply ask yourself, "What is this dream trying to tell me? What is it that I need to know about myself that is coming out in this dream? And listen. Take the possibilities that come, the answers that come. You can always go to somebody else and ask what they feel about it but don't just take what they say. Take what they say and go back and meditate yourself and
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consider their possibilities with what you have already figured out. Put them together and work with the interpretation.
Cracking the Code

This is going to take some practice. It isn't necessarily going to work well the first time you do it but work with it until you get in touch because this is a progressive thing. Here's what's going to happen when you start working with your dream symbology. Your dream symbols will evolve. When you first start working with your dreams and find out how to interpret your dreams they will get increasingly easy because pretty soon you know that water means this, a car means this, the flower means this, the tree means that to me in my dreams. Once you've interpreted all of this dream symbology and you've got it down pat so you know the language of the gods, it will change. All of it. You will change all of your symbology as soon as you have it totally figured out because you're Subconscious Mind is going to panic. It's going figure out that things are no longer hidden, that you are immediately seeing things in the deepest part of yourself and anything that you don't want to see you will then hide even deeper, and the symbology will become increasingly more difficult. However, when that happens, work on the new symbology until you crack the code. It shouldn't take long at all if you really want to open that up. There's another stage you will go through. The first stage is figuring out your symbology The second stage is when your symbology changes and gets difficult and starts playing hide and seek with you. Crack it again. Get your symbology and when you do this time, you are likely to move into the dreams and here's what's going to happen for you. If you've never had this experience you will. You'll get into the dream and you'll know it's a dream. You'll realize that you're dreaming and then you will start working with your symbols and while dreaming you will interpret the dream. You'll dream and interpret the dream at the same time. Then when you are dreaming and interpreting the dream the best thing of all happens, you can make it come out the way you want it to. When you can make it come out the way you want it to in consciousness you can actually change what it was saying in your life. You will change your karma by changing your dream. By acting through it and in it you'll change your life. Prove to yourself that this is possible. Get into your dreams and use them and change them. There's another thing that will happen at this point and that is that in this level of dreaming you will start to converse with yourself and your dreams will become less symbolic and more literal, they will teach on a much higher level. It will become a school and you will attend its classes and you have graduated to a whole new level in consciousness. When you've done that that will really change your life because now you're getting the highest level of instruction that you can possibly get. But still, you have some responsibilities for it even when you reach that level. You still have to pray concerning your dreams and see where your answers are coming from because when you get to the level where you can manipulate your dreams, you can take your consciousness into your dreams, you can take your ego, your personality, and tell yourself what you want to be told and you can begin to fool yourself. Somewhere along the line, all of a sudden, when you've got all of this working just right and you are no longer working in symbols, you're getting literal dreams and you're getting conversations - all of a sudden a dream will hit you one day that is so deep in symbol that you think its for somebody else. That's a dream
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that is trying to tell you something that you'd better get at because it is something that you have hidden from yourself that is important enough for your Subconscious Mind to point it out, but it is also hidden enough that your Subconscious Mind says, "You may not want to see this one and you have to decide whether you do or not." If you do, then work through it.
Brain wave rhythms

When you wake up in the morning you need to remember and record your dreams before you move into the beta rhythm because once you get into beta rhythm its going to be very difficult to recall your dreams. For those people who don't remember their dreams it's probably because by the time you actually awake up, you're already producing the beta rhythm and you don't have the memory of your dreams at that level. The time to remember and record your dreams is before you actually move at all. You should move just one arm to get the pen and start writing but don't get up before you record your dreams because you will disturb the brain wave rhythm and you'll move into beta before you have the opportunity to recall the information that you took in during the dream state. So, if you are consciously coming out of the Temple when you wake up in the morning then you want to recall your dreams while you're still in the Temple before you come down the terraces. Then you will gently and deliberately make the transition from theta to alpha to beta on purpose and you'll wake up more effectively. Instead of waking up groggy and out if it and need three cups of coffee before you can see, you will move into that rhythm and get your energy about you before you start the day. Now, the symbology in your dreams may seem very, very silly at times. It may seem so ridiculous, so far out, so unrelated to anything in your experience that the dream may appear to have no meaning at all. But the message is there if you want it, if you don't want it, just ignore it. The silly symbology allows you to keep the beliefs that you already have unthreatened, if that's what you want to do.
White Throne Judgment

Tonight you will go to sleep and when you go to sleep your soul, the essence of you, your Creator Self, will review the day, the lessons of the day. This Creator Self, your Higher self, your Teacher, along with you, will look at every incident that came up that day, how you responded to it and will tick off whether you did it well or whether you did not, whether you passed or failed the exam of the day. If you did not handle it well you will make a decision, "I must face this again." So you create the future and the dreams are the process of doing that. You are dreaming when you and yourteacher are reviewing the day and you'll make a decision about how well you handled each one of those incidents and you will make a decision whether you need to repeat that in the future or not. This process is called creating karma. For those of you who are familiar with the term karma probably you have heard an eastern concept of karma which suggests that karma is punishment for the things that you have done. You do this - you get it back. And that's not at all what this process is talking about. The process of karma means that you face a lesson, if you handle it well you go on to another lesson and you need not repeat it. If you did not handle it well, you yourself will insist on an opportunity to handle it
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again. And the repeat of the lesson, is the karmic result of not learning the lesson before. So you're creating a new opportunityto deal with a past lesson. What that suggests is that you yourself create your future every night. The process of creating your future is one of reviewing the past, how you dealt with it in the present and then deciding whether that is something that you need in the future or not. So you'll make decisions that create your future by deciding on lessons that you need to meet. So, there are two entries in the Akashic Record. One is the act itself and the other is yourjudgment of that act. To put that in religious terms, it's something that used to disturb me quite a bit when I was a child. I used to hear over and over about this White Throne Judgment, when all the Souls are called and you either pass or fail and you go into a Heavenly place or you are cast into Hell. Well, that White Throne Judgment is happening every night. Its not something that's going to happen some time in the future when the world is destroyed and sheep and goats are divided and all that. Sheep and goats are the activities of your day and as a result of your judgment of that activity you either move into a heaven state of consciousness, a blissful, peaceful state, as a result of that action, or you move into the negative result of that action. That negative result allows you to purge or burn away that action and move into the next experience. So essentially you are the judge yourself. You judge your own actions and you insist on an opportunity to reconstruct or reencounter any incidents that you don't handle well and that happens every night, you create your future. The best way to get ready for the future is to know the commentary, your running commentary, about the future. Listen to what you are telling yourself at night and you'll be ready for the next day. One of the things I was told several years ago about a mystery school is that you'll generally find that when you are actively participating, deliberately cooperating with your teacher and you encounter a lesson of life and you don't handle it well, if you are aware of that, you're next opportunity to encounter that lesson will come within 24 hours. That is not true for people who are not actively participating in their lessons. It may be much further down the road. You will not see the direct relationship between one lesson and the next lesson. This is one of the reasons that I think it is absolutely vital to keep a Journal. If you keep a Journal you will be reviewing your day. You have the Captain's Log Section in which you briefly list the incidents of the day and you have the Mystery School Lessons Section in which you note the things that were difficult for you to handle during the day. You may not be able to interpret those lessons. Maybe you can't figure out what you did wrong. Just list in that section any incident in the day that was even slightly uncomfortable however slightly. If it was frustrating, if it caused you impatience, anxiety, fear, hurt, pain of any kind, anything that caused you to have even the slightest emotional reaction, make a note of it, because those are the incidents that will tonight create your dreams if you make note of them. If you did note them before you went to bed, when you dream tonight you have these things that your dreams are going to made out of. You have the Captains Log, which is what happens today. You have the incidents of the day that contained emotion and you have a cast of characters. A cast of characters is
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called the Validations Section. This is a list of people that you encountered today. These people will very likely be the people who will show up in your dreams tonight and you'll probably say to people "I dreamed about you last night." You didn't really. Youdidn'tdream aboutthatperson. Youdream edabout thepart of you that that person reminds you of. That's what the caste of characters is like. You'll get really ahead in your dream interpretation if every time you meet somebody you look for what there is in you that that person reminds you of. Something interesting that you're going to find out. If the element in you that that person reminds you of is a part of you that you don't like or you're uncomfortable with, you will likely not like that person and you will think that its something wrong with them. You will think that person is egotistical, that person is bossy, whatever. You don't like the bossy element in you and that person reminds you of that. It comes up every time you are with that person. When that person appears in your dream then your teacher is saying to you, "Look, the bossy element in you is going through this experience." Whatever happens to that person in your dream, the part that they symbolize to you, that's what that part of you is going through and that it has to do with that lesson of the day. Interpreting a dream is not a matter of saying this symbol means that. Interpreting your dreams that way is much less effective than making the direct application ofthe dream to the process of life. You must first notice which are the emotional incidents that you're going through in your life at any given moment because that's the stuff that your dreams are going to be made of. You can very much observe that the emotional content of your day will have a profound effect on the emotional content of the dream of that particular night. The day and the night are two halves of a whole. Probably in University you remember that most of the classes were in two parts -lecture and lab. The lecture is when you receive the information and the lab is when you put it to work. The same thing is true of this mystery school. The lab is during the day and if you miss the lecture you're going to handle the lab sections rather poorly. The lectures happen at night. That's the explanation. So if you can connect the two and notice the relationship between the two then you will have the information that you need to go from day to day growing and noticing the running commentary at night about the activities ofthe day. For those of you who have extreme difficulty remembering any dreams at all, and feel as if you never dream, there are two or three reasons for that. Number one - if you don't have a habit of dealing with your dreams, using them, then your Subconscious has finally decided "Why bother. I'm not going to bother to bring these to the surface because they're not dealt with." So you have formed a habit of not remembering your dreams. You're going to have to change that habit which may be difficult at this point. But there are some ways to do it. The first thing that I suggest that you do is make sure that you have your Journal every night when you go to bed. Open that journal to the dream section but make sure that you filled out the Captain's Log first and the Validations section so you've got your caste of characters and you've got the outline of the day and the Mystery School Lessons Section. sections with entries in them then you're ready. I also suggest that you write a letter to the teacher before you go to sleep. The letter to the teacher should be based on the lessons that you recorded in the Mystery School Section. You've had emotional incidents during the day. If you've had negative emotional incidents during the day, any at all, then you have good If you've got those three
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reason to contact your teacher. Your teacher has provided a lesson. If you were victimized by it by the fact that you had a negative emotional response then the smart thing to do is to say to your teacher, "Why did I need that to happen and what should my response have been." information about it. So you have the log of the day's activities. You have a list of the lessons that occurred within the day's activities. You have a caste of characters that participated with you in those lessons and you have a note to your teacher asking to understand the lessons better. Armed with all of that and with your Journal open to the dream page you're already to record your response from the teacher. So you go to bed with your pen and Journal laid out - make sure that you're ready to record everything. Go to bed and when you go to sleep go through the relaxation, the whole relaxation process, always do that, stretching and breathing, tightening and releasing. Get yourself totally relaxed. Go into the Temple and into your dream state. And if you should wake in the middle of the night remembering a dream always turn on the light and record it. Do not think, "I'll remember this until morning." Don't make that mistake because if you do you are reestablishing the habit of not responding to the dream. Wake up and make a note about it and then go back to sleep. If, on the other hand, you wake up in the morning and you don't remember dreaming at all, if after all that, you still don't remember dreaming, then on the dream page of your journal write down the date and write, "I do not remember my dreams from last night. I will remember my dreams," and underline that a couple of times. You're communicating with your Subconscious. You're insisting. The next night, if you didn't remember the dreams after all that determination and preparation, set an alarm clock for the middle of the night. Wake yourself upin the middle of the night. Maybe you can get an agreement from your husband to allow you to do this. But you should wake yourself in the middle ofthe night. The reason for this is not just to be awake at the time that the dreaming is occurring, - there's a more important reason. What you're trying to do is use a shock factor to get in touch with your Subconscious; you're trying to convince your Subconscious that you are determined to remember your dreams. If you'll wake yourself in the middle of the night for a couple of nights in a row, you're Subconscious is going to say, "I give up. I'll dream, I'll dream." And those dreams will begin to come to the surface. There's one more thing that you can do which is very helpful and that is to get large quantities of vitamin B6 in your diet. Take extra supplements of Vitamin B6. Usually people who do not remember their dreams have insufficient B complex in their diets and particularlyvitamin B6. That will help considerably. Keep in mind that your lessons are not all negative. So when I say that the lessons that you encounter during the day are the negative emotional reactions, those are the ones that you are not dealing with well. The ones that you are having trouble with are going to produce a negative emotional response. But remember there are other lessons during the day too and those lessons you may be responding to very, very well and they're going to produce a positive response. You can list those in your Journal too if you want to. And when you dream tonight you're not going to dream just ofthe negative ones. You're going to dream of the positive experiences too. So pleasant dreams are talking about the pleasant experiences of the day and sometimes those dreams will seem as if they're saying to you "Congratulations. You really did this one well." And it will be a very supportive, lively, helpful dream; an encouraging dream and you're Instead of having a negative reaction, what could I have done more appropriately? Write a note to your teacher and ask for more
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moving on to new lessons. So it need not be a negative experience at all. Remember that growing is not a painful experience and the only dreams that produce warnings or concerns are those that came as a result of a negative emotional response. So remember that those are not your only lessons, those are just the ones that you are having the most trouble with. Question: I don't remember my dreams but I want to remember them just before I wake up so I don't disturb my husband. You need to form a better relationship with your subconscious. You need to say, "Listen, Sub-by, I don't want to just dream in the middle of the night." You Subconscious is just as capable of providing your best dream in the last moment before you wake in the morning. So tell your Subconscious, "I want that dream just before I wake up in the morning. I don't want to have to get up in the middle ofthe night with a flashlight and under the covers and do all this." It isn't necessary. You don't have to do that in order to dream. But what you must do is get through to your Subconscious Mind and say, "I want to remember the dreams in the morning." And if nothing else, simply set an alarm clock for five minutes before you usually get up instead of the middle of the night. You're giving yourself new suggestions about how to do it. Once you get in the habit of recording dreams every night then you should be able to get them last thing in the morning consistently.
Some dreams are precognitive.

Not all dreams are processing the events of the previous day. Sometimes dreams are precognitive. Sometimes they are out of body experience. Sometimes they are contact with someone who has passed over. There are other possibilities, but most of your dreams, probably 90 percent at least of your dreams will be processing the information of the day that has just occurred, making an interpretation that you will put into the Akashic Record. Falling asleep at night and dreaming as the ordinary person does is something that you do by accident. That means it is uncontrolled. You have no control over it. You can't use it. You aren't participating in it. It is as if everything is happening to you. That's not an effective dream state. Dreams are important and can make a difference in your growth, but nothing that you do by accident is effective enough to really make a difference in your life. That means that if you're dreaming by accident - you're not guiding it, you're not there on purpose, you didn't consciously make that transition toward getting there - then you're not sleeping effectively and you're not dreaming effectively. The thing to do is change the way that you go to sleep and change the way that you dream. At the same time we want to bring the two states of consciousness closer together to establish a closer interrelationship between your daily activities and your dreams at night.
Make a list of 500 people.

At the beginning of this experience I asked you to start listing 500 people that you have known and I asked you to think about those people when you list them, think about what you knew about them, what part of them reminds you of a facet of you. What you were doing in that experience is you were building a potential cast of characters for your dreams but you're also going back in time so that you're not just depending on the characters that are around you right now. Right now the people who are most influencing your consciousness during the day are the people around you, but even the way you get to know these people is because in your growing up you have met other people who had some ofthe same
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characteristics as the people around you today, and so on. And to some extent we remind you of those people. So you built your knowledge ofthe people around you, you're ability to know me was built over a number of years. The me that you know isn't just me. It consists of all those people who allow you to tune into what this person is like. What you're really doing is dealing with a whole group of facets of your nature that are vulnerable to me. Your life is like an experience that is spread out over a period of time and yet it is happening all at once in this sense. Right now in this moment in time everything that you are experiencing is a result of all that you've experienced up to now. So everything that you've experienced through your life is contained in the right now. But you won't see it in "right now" unless you let your mind go back. As you go back over those five hundred people that I'm asking you to list, the steps in coming to now are brought closer to the surface and "now" becomes richer by doing that. If you make a list of 500 people that you've known, 500 places that you've been, 500 concepts that you have been aware of, - you can't do that without going back over your life. What you're doing by going back is unlocking doors in your Subconscious and letting those ideas out again. Now as you move around in the present, the present becomes richer through the factors that you have stored that let you encounter the present. For that reason, if you make this list of 500 people, objects, places, beliefs, you're going to change your dreams right now by doing that. You're unlocking inner doors and you're providing points of reference that your dreams can use to make a richer commentary on where you are right now. The steps that I want you to take to give your dreams a vocabulary is first, recall the past as far back as you can, go back in time, back in your life, to concepts, beliefs, places, things, that you've been aware of. Get down to the nitty gritty, if you try to make a list of 500 objects then things that you haven't thought of in years are going to come up, and those memories are going to open the situations that happened around those objects. When you start thinking about people and then go back into the past to remember more and more people, you can't do that without unlocking your relationships with those people. available to you to understand a little bit more of who you are right now. So what is the importance of that? This is where it gets really down to basics. We keep saying it over and over - life is a school. Today is a day in school. And this university is divided into two parts, the classes are divided into two halves - lecture and lab. The lab is where you act out the points of the lecture. The lecture is dreamtime. The lab is moving about in your life. You won't get very far in lab unless you pay attention to the lecture. That's why dreams are so vitally important in your life. Those relationships and those beliefs, the fears, all of the things that were stored in your subconscious are now
The Akashic Record

The Source said, "Dreams are the act of a soul making an entry in the Akashic Record." When you are dreaming, you are writing. To clarify that you could say that while you're living your life today you're interacting with people, you're thinking thoughts and your thoughts and your actions are being recorded on the very matter of earth itself, they are being written. That's really the Akashic Record. Then what does dreaming have to do with writing in the Akashic Record? There are essentially two entries in the
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Akashic Record for every action and every thought that you have. One is the incident itself and the other is the meaning or purpose of the incident. The dreams are a commentary about the quality of the communication. Living your life is one thing. Knowing what the incidents in your life mean, what the implications are, is another. So the dreams of the night are an analysis of the purpose and the meaning of the day. I want to extend that to say that there is no day in your life that stands alone. Every day is a part of a period or a cycle, so it is like one step in a longer period. So your dream may refer to more than just the incidents of the previous day, that previous day will be part of the cycle that the dream is talking about. If you are actively working on yourself and if you are noticing the meaning of everybody in your life, you are creating a vocabulary for your dreams to use. If I dream about Ann tonight and I haven't paid much attention to Ann up until now, that dream isn't going to be terribly meaningful to me because I haven't given Ann sufficient meaning in my life. If, on the other hand, I've studied her and I've thought about her and I've noticed the effect that she has on me, I watch the words that she says, the way she acts, and what it brings up in me, what it causes me to feel, what my reaction is, then the second she pops up in a dream I'm going to know what area of life the dream is referring to. It's referring to all those parts of me that are triggered by Ann- the part of me that she reminds me of and the part of me that responds to her, the part that she inspires or the buttons that she pushes- whatever they are. But I'm in touch with what the dream is talking about. If I'm in touch with it I'm going to have a different quality of dream. My teacher doesn't have to go back and tell me what I've already discovered for myself. He can go to the next step. So it simply means that when you are paying more attention to your life your dreams will have more meaning. When you are deliberately dreaming, when you are noticing the symbols in life around you, dreams take on more consequence. They will change in character, they will change in nature, they will be more effective.
Symbolism.
Another step that you can take is as you go through the day begin to think of the qualities of things around you, symbolic qualities. For example, as you look at a house there are certain things about a house that are symbolic of certain ideas. For example, the front of a house, the exterior of a house, is a facade. It is the appearance that the house puts before those who come toward it. So if you're dreaming about a house and the portion of the house that you're dreaming about is the facade, the front, then it is very likely that the commentary in that part of the dream is the commentary about your facade. Your house is where you live and the front of it is the front that you put before the public. What do you see about that facade? Does the dream show something wrong with it? Is it littered, disorganized, does it need paint? Your dream is saying to you "this is the kind of image that you're putting before the public - it is disorganized, it needs painting, it needs to be cleaned up, repaired." Every portion of a house can be interpreted that way in your dreams but the interesting thing is if you really want to make that meaningful then realize that houses don't just do that in dreams. They do that in real life. The place where you live right now will tell you an awful lot about yourself if you look at it. What
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does it look like to a person approaching it? Whatever it looks like it looks an awful lot like the image that you put before the public. If it is littered inside, disorganized, confused, then you can be absolutely certain that it is impossible for you, as the person living in it, to be different from the atmosphere you create around yourself. The reason that the symbology in dreams works is because dreams mirror your daily life. They only take the symbols that are already around you and put them in front of you for you to look at in a new perspective. So the symbols in dreams are no more symbolic than the things that happen around you right now. Your relationships are symbolic. The items in your life - your house, your car, your job - all of those are commentaries about your nature. Your dreams will take on extra meaning when you begin to interpret your whole life. It's not terribly hard to interpret a dream if you are interpreting what's already happening to you. The interpretation of dreams becomes easier and easier by getting in touch with them. When you start building a bond with your Unconscious then you become familiar with the territory. When you become familiar with the territory it is easier to go there. I was talking with you before about the possibility of moving from the awakened state to sleep without losing consciousness. That seems absurd and ridiculous to the person who hasn't done it but if you are at home, alert, in the dream state then you can begin to change it. First of all you record your dreams so faithfully that you begin to recognize symbols when they're in your dreams. You're building a dream catalogue of symbols so that while you are dreaming you're already recognizing the symbols. The next thing that will happen is that while you're dreaming you will realize that you're dreaming and knowing the symbols and realizing that you're dreaming, you can respond. So I know that this dream is saying this to me. OK, I'm going to learn from that and change the outcome of the dream. By doing that I will literally change the dream while I'm dreaming it. But also when I do that the symbols in my dreams will change because I'm more involved. Now I'm dreaming deliberately, I'm participating in my dreaming. I am changing my dreams. The dream symbols will be less and less obtuse and hidden. They become more available to me and the dreams become much more like a conversation rather than something that I have to figure out tomorrow. When you begin to do that you will be as conscious in your dreams as you are throughout your day. At that point there is very little transition from the waking state to the dream state so that you don't have to do what a person ordinarily does. Usually you lie down, you go to sleep, you completely lose consciousness and then you come to the dream state. That isn't necessary now. You can lie down, close your eyes and go into the dream state with no loss of consciousness. You are simply moving from one level of consciousness to another consciousness and you're participating in the dream state. When you can do that you can go anywhere you want to go. I can visit any one of you anytime and know what you're doing. I can be with you in dreamtime. It is no less real. It is, in most ways, just as effective as if I were conscious. It won't be as effective to you because you may not know that I'm there. But if you happen to be asleep you'll probably dream that I came. And if you are in the dream state and I am in the dream state, we can interact.
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Repeating Dreams
One question has come up about repetitive dreams or dreams that are in vivid color or just simply vivid dreams. First of all, repetitive dreams are a message that your teacher is really trying to get through to you and he's trying hard and he is repeating it over and over and over to get your attention. The best way to deal with a dream like that is to notice what was happening in your life at the times when these dreams repeat. If there is a repetitive dream for a period of time and then you don't dream it any more for a few years and then there's a period where it starts to repeat again, look at the similarity between this period and that period and you'll find that the same kinds of things are coming up. That dream is talking about the importance of dealing with that, especially if it starts repeating again. Find out what it is and get that cycle over with because it's a very important lesson and its something major that you need to deal with.
Vivid Dreams
The same thing is true of very vivid dreams. The more outstanding the dream, the more vivid the dream, the harder your teacher is trying to get your attention to say, "This is important. Pay attention to this." It may be positive. It may be not. Usually they are positive and encouraging. Remember that your dreams are not an attempt to scold you or to say that you're doing this wrong but rather to say, "This is an important period." Your dream may be revealing to you how to get it right. It's instructional.
Astral Travel
There are other kinds of experiences, astral travel, for example, sometimes occurs at night. Several people have asked how do I know whether it's astral travel or whether it's a dream. It's very difficult to answer that because the astral travel experience is a subjective experience that can't exactly be described to somebody who's not having it. But essentially astral travel feels very much as if you are somewhere. You're not just dreaming about it; you're experiencing it. The difference in the quality between the experience and a dream is the way you tell the difference between whether it is astral travel or whether it's a dream. It is by the quality of the experience. If it feels that you actually are there, you are experiencing it, it is something that you're really going through and it doesn't feel like a dream, it may very well be astral travel.
One other thing probably it ought to be said that it's not terribly important to know the difference so don't get into a quandary about it. If it is astral travel, you'll probably know it. You'll probably realize "this is different, this is not what I usually experience as a dream."
Lucid Dreaming
There's another kind of dreaming called lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming occurs when you are aware that it's a dream and yet it is very, very clear, very vivid and its not as if you are seeing something, it's as if it were on a screen but you are participating in something. You are aware of yourself in the dream and you're aware of your own body in relation to other things around you.
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Lucid dreaming is what happens when you are conscious while asleep. It' a state that serious students, people who are really learning to deal with the subtler worlds strive hard to accomplish. You're looking for the ability to be conscious while dreaming. You can build that ability simply by deliberately remembering developing your ability to remember your dreams, to get in touch with them, to interpret them. The next step is to remind yourself that you are dreaming while you're dreaming. That will make the dream itself become more lucid. You will also find that by doing that you can interpret the dream while you're still dreaming it, if you are very familiar with your symbology and with what your dreams are saying. And if the dream is having a negative ending you can change that to a positive ending. That is not just a pleasant way to end the dream, it also means that your consciousness has understood the lesson and so you can take care of the situation while you're in the dream just as well as you can take care of it during the day. By doing that you change the situation that you are dreaming about. What that means is that you have changed from the Law of Karma to the Law of Grace.
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Emotions
Emotions and Feelings and How They Work By Paul Solomon June 4,1985 The word 'emotions' and the word 'feelings' are used pretty much interchangeably in our culture, but we want to make a differentiation between them to note that they mean slightly different things. In all ofthe anim aland plant kingdoms, living things are capable of feeling changes in their environment. When the feelings are processed by an intelligence, a consciousness, they take on meaning. Emotions are feelings with meaning. It is not an emotion until you have assigned meaning to it - until it means something to you. That means that it has to have an interpretation; it has to have an inference of something else that is going to or has happened. It has to be assigned an importance by an intelligence. Emotions are different from sensory feelings. Sensory feelings are a result of physical senses responding to the physical environment. The moment that a sensory feeling is given meaning, it goes beyond feeling into emotion Some Examples; All animals and perhaps plants, feel hunger. They feel hunger because a physical mechanism is triggered. The second that the plant or animal adds a sense of fear to the hunger: "Maybe my hunger won't be satisfied," that sensory feeling now has meaning. It has an inference that is more important than the sense itself. The fear of not being fed is a greater stimulus to the plant or the animal than hunger and has more effect on what they decide to do next than the hunger itself. The fear of not being fed is more powerful than the hunger that triggered it. Meaning can be arbitrarily assigned or assigned by a belief system, and the meaning can overwhelm its source. The result is greater than its cause. Emotions are phenomena, which have a result greater than their cause because there is a consciousness involved. This consciousness is capable of drawing deductions, conclusions, inferences, and assigning meanings, and the meaning that is assigned can, and often does, become more important than the trigger that produced the sensation, the sensory response. Even when the feeling first comes, the reaction to it may be stronger than the stimulus so that the stimulus may even be forgotten; the meaning, the belief, the fear involved, the meanings assigned to it, overwhelms it. But all emotions may not be sensory in origin. Emotions can be felt, experienced, and expressed even without sensory stimulus. The only thing we need in order to have emotions is a meaning and a willingness to respond to that meaning. It doesn't even have to have a stimulus apart from our own conscious ability to process our own belief system. We can have an emotion rising out of absolute nothing coming out of our ability to process meanings and beliefs. So we have two kinds of emotions, one, a result response to the stimulus and another that comes from nothing more than processing beliefs and meaning. We have given importance to ideas. The processing of those ideas can produce emotions.
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I stated earlier that in order to have an emotion about something, it has to be assigned meaning. If we make an assumption about plants, for example, we are still learning more about the way that plants think, but let's say for the purpose of argument for the moment, that plants are not reasoning beings. That means they still have appetite; they have to be fed; they are capable of experiencing the need for food. We are not going to call this need "hunger" in plants because in order to experience hunger, the plant needs to assign some meaning to its need for food. As soon as this need is rationalized or thought about, it becomes hunger or appetite. Then the plant is capable of wanting. We don't know whether plants are capable of wanting or not, but if they are not reasoning beings, and if they don't assign some fear or a sense of pleasure to receiving food, then the need for food is a simple organic, bio-chemical process, and we can't call it an emotion. More recently, plants have been hooked up to polygraph machines which show that they react to a person coming into a room. If there is a love bond between the person and the plant, the plant will actually put out energy when the person walks into the room. There is a suggestion there of emotion, of very basic meaning attached to something that has to do with the need of the plant. Now if the analysis of these polygraphs is correct, even the plant kingdom, which we think of as being the most fundamental life process on our planet, other than the mineral kingdom, actually has feeling, wants, needs, actually has emotions. There is a physical stimulus; there is importance attached to that stimulus. There is not only life; there is a desire to have life and to sustain life. In the case of humans, there is a desire for a higher quality of life. It would appear that plants and animals are reasonably satisfied with their surroundings. They wake up, hunt food and satisfy their needs and then they sleep. In most cases they don't reconstruct their environment to make it more comfortable, except to make themselves a place to sleep. What we have in the human condition would appear to be either a blessing or a curse. If we interpret it as a blessing, we look at the fact that we have consciousness. The ability to think and to reason gives us the right, opportunity, and the ability to assign extra importance to particular experiences. We can take an experience that isn't important of itself from a biological-chemical point of view, and we can make it more important. An example is, "Does she like me or doesn't she like me?" Whether she likes me or not may not have biological effect on the length of my life or even the quality. It may not have any physical effect. It may not have any physical stimulus. But if I want her to like me, then I can attach meaning to the way that she looks at me, the way she responds to me. I interpret the way she looks or responds. I can assign meaning to facial expressions to certain body movements. In fact, it is not at all uncommon for a group of young men to sit around and interpret the way that women respond to their presence. It is certainly not uncommon for young men to see something in the movement of the woman and in his fantasy, interpret that to mean that she is attracted to him. We are capable of building the most enormous fantasies. Not only are we capable of believing that certain actions mean she's attracted to us, we also have the ability of interpreting away the fact that she is attracted. The difference is to do with our belief about ourselves. If our belief is that we don't deserve her attraction, we may overcompensate and try to convince ourselves that she is attracted when all evidence says that she's not. Or we may condemn ourselves and not believe that she is attracted when she goes so far as to say that she is. Even saying it, we might not believe it. The difference in the communication in the relationship is the difference in our own belief systems.
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Emotions are the expressions of belief systems sometimes in response to external stimuli, but not always. It doesn't require an external stimulus for us to feel something or to experience or express an emotion. The moment that we give meaning to a belief and entertain that belief we experience an emotion. Emotions and Belief Systems When does an emotion become an emotion and not just a belief system? When is it triggered beyond the belief system into being an emotion? Is it when we add meaning? No. It is when we dwell on the thought. We can't give a mathematical formula here that says one second that thought is just a thought and the next second it is just an emotion, but it is just about that fine. When the possibility occurs in our mind of feeling hurt, jealous, angry, fearful or any other emotion, when this occurs, it should then be labeled "temptation." The possibility has occurred. The second that we confirm that possibility and say, "Yes, I am afraid." "Yes, I am angry," then it is no longer temptation. It is emotion. Emotion is dependent upon our response. Emotion requires a response. Learning to discern the difference between the temptation and the act itself is a confusing issue. The temptation is the presentation of a possibility. The perpetration of the emotion is responding or reacting to the possibility. I look at a situation and there is an instantaneous, a fraction of a millisecond, a spark which says, "I could be jealous." In the next second, if we decide, "Yes, I am jealous," our muscles will move. The movement of those muscles is faster than we can throw a baseball, and pitchers can throw baseballs at very high velocity. We are talking about the firing of neurons in the brain, it happens in a split second; the temptation to perpetration is so fast that it can't be seen. It's like the speed of light. What makes the difference? Can I think it out in that period of time? Can I decide to have an emotion or not have an emotion? Probably not. I cannot decide in the moment the temptation is triggered. Most likely I cannot process my decision through all of the analysis that my brain is capable of to decide whether I am going to have an emotion or not. It happens too fast to process it in the moment.
Can We Do Anything About It? So are we simply victims? Do we have to feel everything that we feel? Can we do anything about it? We can do something about it by setting up the programs that produce the results that we want in our lives. While one person can go from the temptation to the act in a millisecond, it will not produce the same result in another person. Another person will reject the possibility and say, "No. I am not jealous." without having stopped to reason it out. It's not a matter of thinking things through. The difference is that they have wired their circuitry differently before that moment of temptation. The person who doesn't react with jealousy has decided, "I do not want to be a victim of these incidents." They have thought it through at some time. They have made an evaluation, "This is important. This is not important. This is important, but not enough to have this kind of reaction." For example, there are people who have been sensible enough to say, "I am capable of feeling jealousy, but I do not want to experience something which breaks down my muscle tone, destroys my physical body creating ulcers or other illnesses. Therefore when I see this kind of look or that kind of action, I am not going to respond with this kind of emotion because it is not worth it."
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The process we are describing is not one of thinking through all of them. It is a matter of humans making judgments and evaluations. "This is my set of values and when my system of values is threatened, I will react." Two Kinds of Humans There are basically two kinds of human beings. There are self-destructive human beings- this includes about 99.9% or more of all human beings on earth. These human beings are the ones who have given everybody else the right and the ability, and in their own mind even, the responsibility, for whether they feel good or bad, whether their health is good or whether it is decaying. They have assigned that responsibility externally to other humans and to their environment. The evaluation of whether we are going to be self-destructive or self-supportive is generally made by age 3. All of the studies about it would suggest that parents have a lot to do with how the judgment is made, but they also suggest that parents cannot determine whether that child will be self-destructive or self-supportive. They can't actually determine it, but they can influence it. Where a child has a sense of self-importance, and particularly where a child has a sense of responsibility for self, he will build a supportive construct. This is a very difficult thing for parents to do. The very nature of parenting is, "I want to believe that I am this important, protective, teaching being with this tiny, helpless thing dependent upon me." That belief is enormously supportive to parents. They exist on it. "Now, if I teach that tiny little infant, this helpless little being, that he or she is responsible for his own welfare, his own feelings, I make myself useless." Parents don't like to do that. Parents teach dependency to children. Children have the option of believing that dependency if they want to. If they don't, what they get is the enormous weight of the responsibility for themselves and most children don't make that decision. They don't want to feel responsible for their own feelings. They want mommy and daddy to decide whether they should or shouldn't. They grow up wanting mommy and daddy to make their decisions and then resent it if they don't make the decision that met their appetite at the moment. Even after they become adults, they still spend the rest of their lives wishing for mommy and daddy and asking other people to make decisions in their lives - there is nothing wrong with that. It simply creates vulnerability. What can we do with it? If emotions are triggered in a millisecond, if they go from temptation into actual perpetration or experience in a millisecond, how can we change that? The task of life and the task of enlightenment is one of rewiring our computers. It is as simple as that. And enlightenment itself is the act of responding to reality as it is without assigning arbitrary meaning. If one responds to the environment as it is, to reality as it is, without assigning meaning, the only emotions and feelings a person will ever experience are those supportive to the sustenance of life. Only those and nothing more. To feel emotions that are not supportive to life, to survival, is to stimulate the instrument, to feel things unnecessarily. I am not suggesting that this process is bad. What I am saying is that it has a lot of amplitude, a lot of volume. It puts a lot more meaning into life than life has. Now that can be a choice. A master, or an enlightened being, can make the choice to respond with a lot more response than is necessary for survival. Responding with more response than is necessary for survival is the opportunity that is given to every creative being. The blessing is that we can exercise that opportunity. On the other hand, when we exercise that opportunity as a victim, it is a totally destructive force and all it means is that we are out of control. It doesn't mean that we are enjoying life. To respond as a victim is the very opposite. It is the destruction of life. It is torment. It is Hell itself. It is what Hell is. The difference between them is intent, purpose, meaning and deliberation. If we assign meanings to situations which do not serve us, or act on implications which do not deserve it, then we set ourselves up to be victims. Being a victim means more than having our feelings hurt. It can mean loss of property, loss
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of life, loss of opportunity for the freedom of expression. It can mean loss of relationships. That is the difference between positive, joyous emotions and negative destructive emotions. Be Emotional & Love It In spite ofthe fact that we go from temptation to emotion in a split second, there is still the opportunity to be deliberate, to make choices about emotions. Between the stimuli that produce emotional responses... or to say it another way, between one lesson and another, there is time given. That free time, which we use or waste just biding our time, that time is available for us to process our system of values, to think about life. Thinking about life and producing evaluation, images, reasons, purpose, and philosophy of life, that time is what produces poets, artists, priests, priestesses, magicians, and even kings. That free time between the challenges is used to reflect on life, to meditate. When we look at a landscape after a rain, we can look at it and take it for granted. We can just take in what is there, and even without judgments, colorations or meanings, it is pleasant just as it is. When we begin to think, "I'm fortunate to see this," we amplify the pleasure that is available. That didn't come from outside. That came from a decision from inside of ourselves. That is the first step in magic. The instant we think that way, we have begun to give to our environment a power that it did not a second ago have. We have given it more power. Now if we add to that power, increase it and multiply it with our own thoughts, projecting our consciousness out there into that scenery, we give it the power to rejuvenate our body. What will happen as a result is that the electrical currents in our body will be stimulated and we will be healed. That will happen because of the way we thought in response to our environment. We took a door and opened it, and in one terminology, the free negative ions that were created by the thunderstorm and that are available in the atmosphere, were welcomed into our system and we breathed in the prana, the vital essence of life by the way that we thought. We opened the door and allowed the magic to take place. Now another person sitting right beside us, looking on the same vista, can say, "What a hell of a thing to happen. We didn't need rain today. Terrible weather. It makes my bones ache. I can't stand this kind of weather..." That person is slamming doors shut, depriving himself ofthe prana of life. It isn't as simple as positive thinking and negative thinking. I am talking about projecting self into matter, and taking advantage of what is there, and then processing that through our thinking system. The entire body is a thought system and it extends into the force field around the body outside the physical perimeter. The little tributaries, which reach out from our body into the environment, to respond to it, are dilated or closed by our attitude towards the environment. We are built that way. The tributaries, the little feelers, the subtler sensory devices, which extend beyond the physical body into the aura and reach out into our environment are there for the purpose of warning us about the subtler feelings in the environment. They can warn us about emotions that have taken place in this physical environment in the past. Situations have taken place here in which positive emotions or negative emotions have been experienced. For example, when I go into a sacred place where sacred acts have occurred, there is a beauty in the energy. When we walk into that place these nerve endings, these subtler nerve ganglia (if they can be called that) open up and drink in the sacred energy of the place, and we feel the energy of a hallowed ground. When we enter a place where something awful has happened, those same little sensory devices withdraw and pull up into us and pull away from the environment. It is through those responses we experience psychometry. We feel good or we feel bad when responding to the environment around us.
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If we dislike being so sensitive to our environment, at a very early stage in life we can use the force of our will to say to those sensitive little extensions, "Don't react. I don't want to feel theses ups and downs and changes in amplitude with my environment." And so these little extensions become coarse and solid and non-reactive, and we can say, "I'm not psychic." We have killed a natural ability of our body to sense what is going on in the environment. Sometimes very young children do that in response to abuse, the child builds a wall of protection. Now he not only shuts out the abuse, he also shuts out the warmth of the environment and he has to live within himself. That person can become hard and calloused. He gets to use a left-brain, logical mind to deal with the world. If there are storms or ups and downs of emotion, they all happen inside that shell he has built around himself. That kind of person is explosive. They can go so long bottling up emotions and then, suddenly and without a reason, those emotions erupt simply because the container can't hold them in any longer. So we have these several different kinds of people, some who are ultra-sensitive to their environment. They are the ones whose little feelers creep out around every corner feeling everything. Sometimes they are delighted to experience everything that they experience, but sometimes these very sensitive people feel pain everywhere they go because the feelers that they put out are assigned the job by their own mind of looking for pain everywhere. This happens because they are afraid. So these very sensitive psychic people only experience warnings, disasters, and negative psychic energies around them. The problem is they can detect it anywhere because it is omnipresent. There is always pain on the earth. People who seek out, sense, respond to, mourn about, and are preoccupied with pain can always find it. They tend to be bitchy, cranky, sick, and griping, and finding life a great displeasure. And no one can say they are wrong. What they are finding in life is really there. What you seek you find. There are people who assign to their sensors the job of looking for wonderful things in everything that happens. They might be completely insensitive to a negative warning. I can't say that's good either. If we take everything in reality and say, "That's wonderful. I wouldn't change it," then we are not going to be an activist and do something about negative situations. We will gloss them over as if they weren't there. A master is not someone who pretends that bad is good. A master is not someone that finds bad in everything and must do everything over. A master is the someone who experiences all things as they are and allows them to be as they are, knowing that he can take action to change things, he can amplify the experience of them and make them more if he wants to, or he can turn off the experience and make them less important at will. In short, a master in one who is not a victim, he is someone who makes decisions. A master is one who has learned to think as quickly as these responses to the environment - microseconds. He or she is one who takes deliberate actions and is responsible for every emotion. Options in Response Now, any time a thought, a stimulus, comes from the environment, or a thought pops into the mind and there is an opportunity for experiencing an emotion in the next second, there are several things that can be done. One of the things that people do is to give in to the emotion. Every time there is the temptation or the possibility, it turns automatically into perpetration simply because we are living with whatever comes up. Whatever that is, we react to it and feel completely helpless to do anything about our emotions or feelings. This is being a very feeling person. That is one possibility. Then there is the option of suppression. The difference between suppression and transformation is this. When there is a feeling or an emotion that pop up into the mind or consciousness, we can actually
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experience that emotion in the next second, and after already experiencing the emotion we can decide, "I can't afford to feel this way," or "I can't let anyone know that I feel this way." And we can suppress it. Then we act differently. We act as if we are not experiencing the emotion that we are experiencing. That can be a useful decision. It's not wrong. If the possibility of an emotion or a feeling pops up and we react to it in the next second, we take action. This action may be as simple as moving a muscle around our mouth or eyes, or we may have a tiny, little change in our facial expression, or move a couple of muscles in our shoulders in the split second between the temptation and the actual emotion. Playing the Role When an emotion comes up and we make the slightest muscle change, that change reinforces the alrightness of the emotion. The next time that temptation comes, the muscle change will happen more quickly because we accepted it once. If we accept an emotion one time, it is reinforced as a pattern of acceptance for the next time. If we experience it a third time, that emotion becomes more automatic and we become more helpless against it. Every time we react, that action emphasizes or supports the stimulus. There are two theories that have come up regarding this. One says, "Action follows thought." And an old psychological model, "If you think, then you act." A new psychological thought is that "Thought follows action." This means if we make a face, use our muscles of expression to look as if we're experiencing fear, the thought of fear will come into our mind. Actors use this "thought follows action" idea most frequently in a system called Method Acting. What actors do is study the body posture and facial expression of a particular emotion and mimics it in order to feel that emotion. This means that actors on stage cannot just pretend to feel emotion, they actually feel and project the emotions, and they become what is called "believable actors." A believable actor is one who is so much into the role that he is projecting the psychic energy of the thoughts and emotions of the role. It looks like magic, and it is magic at its height. It is occultism. They take the emotions of the audience and they carry them through the actions they are portraying on the stage. That is real sorcery. It can move a group of people into battle; it can produce a plague or an epidemic; or it can produce a stock market crash. It can do amazing things to the human psyche because these are people who are taking the energy of life and amplifying it through particular modes of expression. They are creating with their muscles, with their physical body, and with the instruments around them. Not just the muscles, but they are the fiber through which this energy is pushed to reach out into the audience and cause a sympathetic response. The split second then, that we react to an emotion, we reinforce that that emotion is appropriate to that circumstance. We make it harder to respond differently in the future. Every time we react with anger, we make it harder not to react with anger in a similar circumstance in the future. A Matter of Decision I am not saying you should force a different facial expression. If we feel ourselves experiencing an emotion and say, "I don't want to feel this," we can try to make our face like a mask, and even though we are feeling one way, we can pretend to feel another. That is suppression. The difference between suppression and transformation is the effectiveness of a decision. If we decided to feel differently, but do not convince ourselves to actually feel that way, we will suppress. It is a decision made without conviction.
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If on the other hand, we change an emotional response and affirm that we do want to feel differently, if that is a complete decision, it is not suppression, it is transformation. The difference is in the wholeness of the decision. If we really believe it and really want to change it, we experience transformation. If we believe, for example, "I am acting the way I am acting because I am supposed to," and the belief about that is that that is imposed upon me from without, "I am acting this way because it is proper," then it is not our own decision. It is not whole, and we are suppressing. Emotions and feeling, ideas and beliefs that are suppressed in that way have to come out at some time in some place. Ulcers, cancer, emotional and mental breakdowns, mental illness - all of these things are made from suppressed emotions. But the fact that we got angry and didn't act angry does not necessarily mean that we suppressed. It may mean that we transformed if we saw from an observer space that the reaction that we were having was not serving us and we want out of that situation, we can realize that there is another kind of response that we feel good with and that meets all our criteria for responding to the situation. When we can see ourselves in that new response, when we can project it and it feels good, it feels whole, then we experience transformation instead of suppression. It is consciously possible to think so fast that you can resist the temptation before actually emoting. Yes, it is possible to stop the reaction and make a different choice, but not unless we take the whole of our life and process it, look at our value system, and be deliberate about what we are feeling. The first step is to move from a victim space into an observer space. The next step is to become a director, a producer, and create the production of new emotional responses. Once we have created, accepted, and acted on a belief, we are in charge of how we feel under all circumstances. We are constantly responsible for how we feel and we don't want not to be responsible. This belief system builds a wiring that is so fast that we will respond to every discharge of energy that would have produced emotions. We will have an emotion when we want to and not have an emotion when we don't want to. That is a dynamic responsibility that most people don't even want, let alone consider possible. In order to do that, we have to have some point of reference in our background. The point of reference for most people initially comes from their parents. There have been experiments where a laser beam light has shined into a baby's eye and bounced off the retina in order to reflect an image out and see what the baby is looking at. What they found from watching babies eyes is that from the earliest few days the baby watches his mother's body. Not just any body, but the mother, as long as she is in range of eyesight. As the baby gets a little older, he actually focuses on her eyes. The patterns o fth e baby's eye focus don't just center on the face. From watching the mother's eyes, the baby gets his basic expressions. Before he can even talk, he registers recognition of approval and disapproval. These are the first two expressions that we learn to recognize. There are very few things that are universal. Language is not. Facial expressions are. When we see a facial expression, we have to interpret it. People in all different cultures register shock, fear, anger, hurt and joy or happiness in basically the same way. There are some small differences and these give people personality characteristics. We can notice that a person smiles differently, but it is still a smile. A baby learned to first recognize approval and disapproval, and then learned to recognize shock. Another interesting thing about this is that when adults come into the presence of a baby, they do two things. They raise the pitch of their voice, and they
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exaggerate their expression. They don't just smile. They smile ten times bigger than they would ever smile at an adult. Both males and female do that. It is an automatic response to babies. Babies drink that in, and they learn to recognize the whole variety of different expression. While they are learning to recognize them, they give meaning to them. Giving meaning to facial expressions is a survival tool. That was demonstrated in tests where babies were brought to the edge of a drop off to see whether babies would either crawl across it or recognize death as a danger. What every baby did first was to look at the drop off, and then at the mother's face. If the mother registered encouragement and approval, they might reach out to touch it. If the mother registered shock or fear, they backed off. Interpreting facial expressions is a very basic survival technique. Step one is the ability to recognize the expression. Step two is to give the expression a meaning. Step three is when they decide what to do about it. If we see an expression of disgust or disapproval on another's face towards us what do we believe that means for us? Do we want to run away from the other person or change the other person's mind about us? Or does it mean we want to take a look at our own actions. If we catch someone looking at us, particularly a stranger, one ofthe things we will almost automatically do is look at our clothes to see what is wrong. We will look to see what they are looking at. In our culture, it is polite to look away. If a person doesn't look away, we assume they are looking at something. Then we think, "Why are they looking at me?" Just a look is loaded with implications. It could be a sexual come on, or disapproval, or interest, or a whole variety of possibilities. Depending upon whether or not we want to impress someone, it is either taken as a compliment or an invasion of privacy. If we have a lot of self-confidence, it is likely to be taken as a compliment. If we feel unworthy or disapproved of, and if we were disapproved of as a child, particularly with stern looks from our parents, then we will melt under that look feel accused and angry and want to make that person look away. The meanings that expressions have are already stored primarily as a survival mechanism. We then interpret the meaning of that expression, which could either be right or wrong. We can think it means one thing when it means something else entirely to the person who is expressing. Subtleties of expressions are not that universal. Basic expressions are. Fear is a universal expression, but there are subtleties of expressing fear. What we call "culture" is our ability to refine those basic expressions and disguise them to be sophisticated. The more sophisticated the culture, the more deceptive the facial expressions and body language. The same is true for the person. We learn that it is good manners to disguise certain features of body language in order to deny that we are thinking what we are thinking. This censorship increases the likelihood that we will misinterpret an expression. We see an expression. We recognize it. We interpret it. The critical step is, "What does that mean about me?" If a person is ruled by fear and has a negative self image, they will always tend to think the worst first. If a person feels good and self confident, they will tend to think the best about themselves. So the key is in discovering what we feel, think, and believe about ourselves. If we can replace fear with love, love will rule our life and our interpretations and actions will be based on love. We Can Change Our Minds We are not mechanical beings. We are not predictable beings. For example, parents can do everything 'right' and the child will turn out 'wrong.' The parents could do everything 'wrong' and the child will turn out 'right.' Every child, every baby is an individual expression. If all our emotions were programmed
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mechanisms and if we could say, "When you do this, that results," if we could make it that simple, there wouldn't be any point in writing a book on emotions because everybody would have the same emotional response to the same stimulus. Why write about that if it is automatic? We are decision makers and we can decide to respond differently to the same stimuli that we have responded to in a particular way in the past. We can change our minds. When we change our minds in the moment, we make a dent in our belief system. When we change our mind in response to a stimulus several times, we begin to alter that belief system. When we change our mind and respond in a new way long enough for it to become a habit, we have totally reprogrammed our belief system. For most people, that takes about thirty days of using the new expression. It takes thirty days of repetition for most people to form a habit. In order to form a belief, we have to believe it. Our mind is jammed full of beliefs that we wouldn't believe if we examined them. They are not believable. Things like, "If you call me a name, that can do something to my mother's purity." That is not a believable belief. Or if we believe that when a person says a particular thing or looks a certain way, we should hit him or punish him. There are beliefs that are childhood beliefs. They are childish. They get stuck in there from childhood. As adults, we don't get rid of them or change the beliefs. We just alter our response to it and we act more adult and more proper. We no longer hit Johnny when he looks at us this way. We just think, "I would like to hit him." The secret to making our personality over and taking responsibility for our character is to get it out there where we can see it. If we have an emotional reaction to anything, anything in this world, we have a belief about it. What do we believe about it? Do we believe that it can harm us? Do we believe that it shouldn't exist or that such things are not nice or dirty? What do we think about it? State it in some manner and if you see that your statement turns out to be ridiculous, change it. Say, "That's not what I believe. That's not what I want to believe." If we remind ourselves of this and we stop responding with a particular emotion, then we will form a new emotional response-, which will take about thirty days to make automatic.
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Dreams
GUIDED MEDITATION FOR DREAM WORKSHOP MEADOW When I come to this sacred place, I remember to set my purpose for being here. I come here to establish communication with the Source of my being. I am a student in the School of Life, and I want to awaken the ability to see and hear and feel this Source teaching me through every person, and every situation in my daily life. I awaken my appreciation and devotion to this path of learning and growing. I see a ray of light stream through the cloud at the top of the mountain to envelope me, and with a magnetic pull, feel myself being drawn toward the first terrace, the red terrace. RED TERRACE Here in the Red Terrace, I feel energized and enthused. I begin to look forward to the gift in each lesson that my Inner Teacher has in store for me. I now take the initiative, and search for these lessons, rather than waiting until they force themselves upon me. I expect to be changed by this experience. And with this growing expectancy and determination, I move from the red terrace into the orange terrace. ORANGE TERRACE Here in the Orange Terrace, I take the time to review the experiences of today. I realize that each experience has a golden value in it. If I can see the experience and release it, it will be planted like a seed in this garden so that new flowers of understanding and insight will grow within me." See the events of your day passing before you, step by step from the time of awakening. You may image these events playing on a movie or video screen, or you may 'remember', and momentarily re-experience them. Give particular notice to those events that held an emotional charge, those which were challenging. Remember the situation, and remember your thoughts, judgements, and feelings. And as you are doing this, begin to build a bridge between the inner world of yourterraces to your body. Take a moment now to build a bridge from this inner world of the second terrace, to your body. Maintain the inner focus, as you begin to expand that focus to include your physical body. Let the memories continue to flow smoothly, and slowly take a deep breath, and prepare to pick up your pen and your Journal, and begin to write into the Journal, into your Captain's Log, an outline of your day's events. As you remember the people who came into your life today, make an entry into your Cast of Characters Section. Make a note of their name, if you know it, and of the qualities they embodied for you, either positively or negatively. Remember that each person who comes into your school is a messenger, bearing a communication from the Source of Life. Take a moment to note what you recognized in each of these messengers, and begin to open your mind to other possibilities that your InnerTeacher might revealto you.
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Continue to write these outlines in both the Captains Log and the Cast of Characters, listing your experience as a student in the Mystery School of Life. And when you have finished making your entries, spend a few moments of quiet time in this terrace, releasing these experiences, seeing them fall away into the past as you prepare to move up the mountain. Know that you are making entries here in your Akashic Record, bringing closer to conscious awareness all record of your thoughts and actions so that you can become a more responsible and aware student in the School of Life." YELLOW TERRACE Again, experience yourself releasing all of these experiences here on the Orange Terrace, letting them fall behind you into the ground. Feel yourself becoming lighter, weightless, free from the burdens and cares of the day. Let them all go and begin to rise upward into the Yellow Terrace. Feel the freedom of releasing your hold on your own perception of reality... let it go and begin to open to new possibilities. Consider the possibility that there are new ways of seeing things, new ways of understanding, and new ways of expressing yourself that could transform your experience of life. Begin to look forward to discovering these, and with the openness and eagerness of a child, affirm "I am new, I am," and lift upward into the Green Terrace. GREEN TERRACE Here in the Green Terrace, feel yourself embraced by a Presence of pure, Living Love. And take these next few moments to write a letter to this Presence of Living Love saying, "I want to get to know you better. I want to begin to recognize you in my daily life. I want to see, and hear, and feel you, especially in those moments when I tend to forget and slip back into old habits." 1. Pick up your pen, and communicate in your own words to this Presence, your questions about the lessons that were presented to you in the School of Life today. Remember the situations from the Captains Log, consider the cycles of growth that you have experienced, and that you are currently experiencing, and the people your Source has brought into your life today. Consider all these things, and communicate from your heart your own desire to see these things as your teacher sees them. And ask that you become aware of the teacher's presence in your dreams tonight, continuing to learn as a student in the School of Life. 2. When they have all finished, remind them to look forward to further communication, whether through meditation, dreams, or in their daily waking state. Know that messages and insight will come. They have knocked, and the door shall be opened. 3. Remind them to reattune before bedtime, through the 7 terraces, into their temple.
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Emotions
HOW TO GET WHAT YOU WANT The only point of reference you have for being alive is your ability to respond and relate. It is the pleasure and the privilege of mankind to assign meaning to feelings, and we are not suggesting it is inappropriate to give meaning to people's facial expressions, words, the good or bad in life. If you know the meanings that you have given and know that it is your choice to live with them, you will enjoy and thrive upon the responses to those meanings when they come back to you. Now sow the seeds that you want in life and reap the harvest that they bring. THE PURPOSE OF 'WANTS' The secret of being prosperous in life is instead of wanting what you don't have, want what you do have. When you have sown a seed that returns hurt to you over and over again because you have one little "want" inside that has never been satisfied, reach in and find another thing to want. Look at what you have and decide that you want it. By doing so, you will recognize and increase that value. You make yourself rich when you enjoy what you have. If there is one little 'something' that is unsatisfied, and you really, really want it, ask yourself, "What am I putting into life and what am I getting from it." Isth e re a ch a n ce o fga in in gth e sa tisfa ctio n o fth atw a n t? Isthatservingm e?" Realizethatthe only purpose for having wants is to provide a stimulus to action to get what it is that you are wanting, the object of that desire. WANT WHAT YOU HAVE There is a current belief that there is not really anything that you can do about the things that you want. If you want them, you want them, and you can't help it. You either satisfy the desire or burn with desire for the rest of your life and suffer. Humans are deciding beings and that is what makes us humans. You can decide concerning your wants and desires, and you can decide to want differently. It is the very nature of desire to say, "But I don't want to want differently. If I wanted something else, I would want it, so I'm helpless." You can think that way if you want to, but the results are predictable. What you get to do is be the ultimate victim. If you can't change your wants and desires, you are miserable and doomed to live that way. The problem of life is that it is eternal. Until you can change your wants and desires, you will live in Hell. With you own decision and your own energy, you can satisfy your own wants and desires, even if it means using your ability to change them. THE BIGGEST HURT Probably the biggest hurt that human beings ever experience is wanting another person to feel or act differently from the way they are. The root of that desire is the need of our ego to say, "I am important enough to make that person satisfy my desire instead of satisfying his or her own desire." It is the desire to be more powerful than another person. Satisfying that desire, however, would be a disaster to yourself and the other person. You are asking for something that never should be in this world. You are
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asking to dictate another's feelings, actions, emotion or responses. That doesn't feed life, it feeds death. What feeds life is supporting another person's feelings, another's beingness. For you to wish or long for another person to respond differently than they do is to wish that person dead. You may have some convoluted idea that that would make you more alive, but inflicting your will on another is not the way life is produced. If you can, instead, experience the delight of life through his experiencing delight, then you have truly experienced another person. If you make him wrong "You should love me, but you don't," -- If you could somehow force him to act the way you want him to act then you will have forced your will against his. The only thing you can get from that is a dead person. This even applies to wanting to change another person's responses that you perceive are not in his own best interest. If, for example, someone you love is experiencing fear about something you know has no power to hurt him and that fear is projected as anger, hurt, or jealousy, the only thing that you can do is act as you would act toward a child. The only way to help a child who is scared is to try to reassure him and give him a feeling of strength. You can't take his emotion and bend it to your own will. If you could force a child not to be scared, you would erase the child's experience of the moment. If you can, instead, reassure the child with support, convey a feeling that there is security in the world and lead the child to a more positive experience, he will replace his fear with another emotion. It will make him more alive. Don't force a change, encourage a change. When you react with punishment, or anger if he doesn't change, you are attempting to enforce your will on the world. What you need to do instead is to try to provide security, alrightness, a sense of comfort, a sense that another person cares and supports the way that he is and the way that he feels. A BATTLE OF WILLS To pit your will against someone else's will and to require that their will match yours, is wanting to own somebody. For example, if you say, "I love so and so," it means one of two things: you either love that person for who they are, loving what they love and what they are doing, or it means you want that person to respond to you with the feeling that you have for them to the exclusion of everybody else. If that person doesn't do that, you promise to be hurt for the rest of your life. If it means that, it is not love. It is possession. It is wanting to impose your will on somebody else. If you love someone, really love them and that person falls in love with somebody else, you will want your lover to be with that other person. Now if, on the other hand, you say that the only way for your love to be fulfilled is for your lover to love you, then what you want is to stifle his or her will, to make your lover perform according to your desires and expectations. That isn't love. The biggest problem in discussing love on this planet is that people call love the opposite of what love is. People think that love is forcing another person against his will to respond to you in a particular way that satisfies your appetites. That isn't love. It's imposition of your will upon another, making the other person a puppet on a string. It's all too often done with a license and sufficient economic manipulation to say, "If you don't perform according to my expectation, I can sue you for child support or alimony and make you pay for the rest of your life to remind you that once you said you loved me." That means he voluntarily went behind the bars of your prison. It has nothing to do with love. It is the imposition of will upon others.
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BECOMING 'AS GODS' We do that because we want to be 'as gods.' If you can get me to jump when you say 'jump', to let your will be mine, then you are very important and very powerful. And I am nothing more than an extension of your ego, a piece of flesh jumping around on the end of a string. If you are angry, hurt, or afraid, I feel it. I am at the mercy of your every emotion and feeling. - Wants When you want to have family, friends and lovers at the mercy of your feelings constantly, it is the same as wanting to make yourself a king on a throne who is so powerful he can rule everyone around him. It's a parody of love. It comes from love-starved people who haven't met their own needs for being important without having to rule the actions of others. IS A LOVE RELATIONAHIP POSSIBLE Does that mean we can never have a love partnership that is a life-long bond and feel loved? No. We can both make a choice in which our wills come together and not because you didn't want it, and I somehow manipulated you until I overruled you. There is partnership and there is ownership. Ownership is destructive and should never happen with another human being. A partnership is putting together two wills. It stays together not because you have a license, a promise, or a vow, but because you still want, today, to be together, putting your energy side by side into a thing that you mutually want to do. You may want to raise children, have a wonderful home, have a career, or a creative endeavor, but you are together today because you want to be and for no other reason. Does that mean the relationships can't be lifelong. Where two people meet and put together their wills and are not forced to, they can choose to be together because they want to be for the whole of life. They make a complete marriage. HOW CAN YOU CHANGE WHAT YOU WANT? To form that marriage relationship, or any other whole relationship, you need to be a person who knows that what you ultimately want, above all other wants, is to be in charge of your life. You don't want to be 'as gods.' You want to be God in your own life, not imposing your will on anyone else, knowing that is not the nature of God to want anything He doesn't have. You can have anything that you are willing to claim for your own, but you can cancel that ability if you believe that you are empty because you want things you don't have. If you confirm your lack and create a hole in yourself, you have given something outside of yourself the power to make you sad. You have cancelled your power to fill the gap. The power to fill your wants is the power of prosperity. If you want what you have, what you can claim and accept, then you can bring whatever you want and need into your sphere of influence. You may have many, many wants, and if you want to be in control of your wants, of your life, you will not let any of the other wants deprive you of the ultimate goal. You will decide it is alright not to have a particular want. You will be alright with yourself and you won't let any desire rule over your life and destroy your alrightness in the moment.
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ONE BIG 'HAVE' You can cancel all of the little wants with one big 'have.' That 'have' is: "I am responsible for what I love, what I desire, what I want, what I will, what I do.. That does not extend to canceling anyone's will or manipulating anyone's will." -WantsYou have two choices. If you have an unfulfilled want, you can give it priority and be a victim. Or, you can claim your right and ability to be a deciding being. You can be the God that you are, knowing that your emotions, your feelings, your choices, your decisions, your power is yours.
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Dreams
Journal as Akasha I have a belief that one ofthe most important techniques in all of ILC is the Journal. And that can be a problem because of all techniques that have ever been given in ILC, the one that people have most resistance to is guess what? The Journal. And if that's our most important technique and people have resistance to it, then what do we do? Try to find out what resistance is or what the resistances are, and how we can correct them. I think there are two primary resistances to the Journal, one is the discipline needed due to the amount of time and effort that it takes to keep a Journal. That's the primary resistance to doing the Journal. But the other resistance is lack of understanding of what the Journal is supposed to do. If the person doesn't see the benefit of the Journal, then they're not likely to use it. If people do see and understand clearly the benefit of the Journal, I think it can overcome the other resistance and make it easier to use, make us more willing to muster up the discipline and make the effort, and experience the benefits of the Journal. For many years, the Journal presented in ILC didn't have a structure. We simply told people to record their meditations and the disciplines that they were following, and keep a record of their progress, keep a record oftheir relationship with the disciplines of ILC. And the reason that it was presented that way as sort of a single entry thing is because that's the way my journal began. I began the Journal because my teacher required me to. But in that instance, of course, it was a one to one relationship and he knew whether I was keeping a Journal or not because we were together most of the time, and he was constantly telling me more things to put in my Journal. He didn't break it down into seven sections, but he did give me a number of different kinds of entries. There may have been more than seven because he didn't specify them as different kinds of entries. He simply, as we went along, pointed out this and that that I should put into the Journal, and so the Journal became much more than I had put in in the beginning. It started out as a log, just logging the activities, and I would put all sorts of comments in it. Some were objective comments, some objective observations, and some were subjective beliefs and viewpoints and so on about the observations. And when my teacher realized that, he made me separate the two, and that made the first two Journal divisions, the objective from the subjective. At that time I was keeping a separate dream book, and as we travelled together, I was running around with both arms full with my Journal, my dream book and a briefcase and all his things, and he would look at me with a sort of a look, -- he never said anything and I wasn't sharp enough to take that look
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and do something about it. I just sort of let him look at me that way and got used to it until he finally added some words to the look. He said, "Frankly, I'm embarrassed to be seen with you in public with all of those things under your arms. Why don't you put the dream book into the Journal and get rid of some of that other stuff. Quit carrying all of these things, you look like a baggage man following me around." So the dream book became a part ofthe Journal as a result of that, and then one night we were studying. I didn't have my Journal out because my Journal was something I carried during the day, it wasn't what I carried with me when we were sitting down to discuss things or have a class. When we sat down to have a discussion and a class I had a little notebook spread out, a spiral notebook and I copied down everything into that. And then one night he looked at me very peculiarly and he said, "What do you do with all the information after you copy it down in this little notebook?" That sort of stumped me. What do you do with notes that you take in class? So I sort of said, "Well, I keep them." You should have seen the look that that brought on. "Keep them. What do you keep them for? If you're going to keep them, you should sort them up here. What good does it do to carry them around in a pad or stuff them in a drawer? Am I giving you these lessons just so that you can store somewhere?" So I said, "Well, I do read them later." He said, "With what discipline?" I said, "What do you mean by that?" He said, "Do you have a regular system for going back to read a certain day's lesson, a certain number of days after you've had the lesson? Is there some system for making sure that you review these things?" I had to admit that there was not. He said, "Why do you have the spiral binder, and the dream book, and the Journal, and all of these other things?" So I got the message. I started bringing my Journal to the sessions and the Mystery Schools lessons section became a part of my Journal. The teacher never, ever, ever sat down and said, "We're going to talk about the Akashic Record today. If I found out anything about the Akashic Record it was within the context of conversation that came up when we talked. There was never a formal class, in other words. The only thing that he ever talked to me about was my stupidity. The only thing we ever discussed were the mistakes that I made and the Mystery School lessons that it brought on. And in the context of those Mystery School lessons, I found out about all of the other things.
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So this is how the Journal came together. It still wasn't broken down into categories until later. In trying to get the Journal to be more meaningful to people working with it, I began to point out the composite parts ofthe Journal and then began to separate that into Journal sections.
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Dreams
THE LANGUAGE OF THE GODS Dreams, the language of the Gods, are the opportunities of the Source of our consciousness to communicate with us. When we are awake, our mind is constantly busy. We may ask God questions, "God, what would you have me to do as the next step?" But most often our active mind immediately responds, "Is it this?" "How about that?" "It must be this because of that." And God says, "I can't get a word in." That is as far as the communication can go, and we wonder why we did not get our answers. When we sleep, our mind is not mulling over the problems ofthe day. It comes to rest, and we are forced to stop and listen. Several years ago a number of psychologists became interested in the origin, purpose, and results of dreams. Ann Faraday, and also Stanley Krippner, who was working at Maimonides Hospital in New York City, began researching dreams. They set up sleep laboratories using EEG equipment and biofeedback techniques. They wanted to know how often people dream, how deeply they sleep during dreams, the content of dreams and how they relate to consciousness. Many dream researchers have said that dreams are nothing more than a response to stress. When there are stressful or emotional incidents during the day, we dream about them at night to release the tension. Stanley Krippner and Mrs. Faraday concluded that dreams deal with much more than stress. One of their most important discoveries is that almost all dreams recap the activities of the previous day. Ann Faraday noticed that dreams seem to occur in three segments, the past, the present, and the future. In addition, the first dreams of the night seem to relate mostly to the past, those during the middle of the night to the present, and the ones closest to morning to the future. Based on their research, we did several Readings on dreams, and asked the Source, "What, in fact, are dreams? What is their relationship to the past, the present and the future? How and why do they refer to the activity of the day?" The Source said, and I have never seen it any book, "Dreams are the activity of the soul making an entry in the Akashic Record." We know that the Akashic Record is formed essentially by activity, emotion and thought. When you think, you emanate an emotional or electrical impulse, and the atmosphere is affected. What you think, feel and do are recorded on the skein of time and space, as Edgar Cayce described it. The earth carries this record of your existence and is constantly being created and changed in the ongoing process. The record is objective. It describes exactly what you think and do. It makes no judgments about those thoughts and actions. In our research, we learned that Edgar Cayce had once told a woman in a Reading, "You were a nun in a past life, and you were a prostitute in another life." He described both of those lives briefly, and then he made an interesting observation. He said, "The soul made considerably more progress as a prostitute." I
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wondered where that value judgment came from. Who decided that the progress was more in that lifetime? Was it Cayce? Was it some Master Teacher who was reading from the record? If the record itself is objective, who makes the judgment? We did another Reading and the Source said, "Every night when a person sleeps, the soul goes through a process of analyzing and judging its own activities and thoughts. "The experience of the Great White Throne of Judgment, of a soul standing before God being judged for good and evil, actually occurs nightly. The soul presents its activities, thoughts and emotions ofthe day before what might be called a Karmic Board. There, a high judge reviews the occurrences objectively and makes decisions about them. He looks at the origin of the activity, the stimulus ofthe past and our response and prepares a commentary on our needs as a soul. Every incident of every day, including consciousness and intent, is reviewed by an inner judge, the Karmic Board. It examines why you experienced what you did based on past thoughts and actions, and looks at your response. Did you react in the same negative way? Did you learn anything as a result of your experience? Did you respond this time in a new way? Will the experience have to be repeated? Based on the way you reacted to your experiences of the day, the judge plans your future. He sets the stage, and sends in the people to provide the situations according to what you did in any given day. It is an automatic procedure, and if you are deprived of the opportunity to do it, you will lose your sanity within a short period of time. So every night you review what you created in your past in respect to people, situations, reactions and responses. You look at how you handled each challenge or potential challenge. By your own thoughts and behavior, you create your future every night of your life. You only need to know past and present to know what the future will be. You are building your future now. You are making decisions about what will be by what you are doing with present opportunity. That is the origin and purpose of your dreams. As we discussed in the previous chapter, karma is not something from the past. You are creating it right now, and may meet that karma tomorrow. You do not have to wait for another lifetime to meet the lessons you are setting up now. You are constantly creating and living through karma. The Law of Karma, however, bows to the Law of Grace. The Law of Karma says you must live through and experience the results of what you have set in motion. The Law of Grace says if you understand what you have done and become a different person from the one who did it, you do not have to repeat the experience. A change in consciousness cancels the need for the dramatization of the lesson. God does not want to punish you, He only wants you to grow and overcome patterns that do not work in your life. If you have learned a lesson, you simply do not have to repeat it. That change in consciousness can happen right in the middle of a dream. When you work with your dreams regularly, you can get to a point where you know that you are dreaming during the dream itself. You can even interpret your dreams while you are dreaming. For example, if someone said something you did not like today and you lost your temper and handled the relationship badly, tonight, you will dream about the experience. It may not be literal. Most often, the dream will come in symbols. You dream in symbols because your consciousness does not want to face what
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you did, so you hide it from yourself. When you begin to work with dreams, you are giving a message to your consciousness that you do want to know. When you persist and continue to interpret your symbols, you will begin to recognize your own symbology. That may last for a while, but soon you will notice that your symbols have changed. Your personality is very stubborn. It does not want to give up old patterns and habits. It does not want to change. If you continue to persist, however, eventually most of your dreams will become literal. They will be clear until you reach a new plateau, another pattern, lesson, mode of behavior that you do not want to recognize in yourself. Then they will change again. When you persist, these new symbols will become clear, and so on. When you do recognize that you are dreaming about the incident that occurred during the day, if it ends right there, something similar will happen the following day. You then have the opportunity to repeat your reaction or change it to a right response. By a right response, we mean more harmonious, more loving. This time you do not lose your temper or feel out of control. Or, you can change your response in the dream itself. You can notice within a dream, "This is the past. I have received an analysis of the accumulation of what I am. This is the incident that came in my life today. I recognize it as a symbolic description." And then there is a flash, "There goes the future. This is the karmic result of what I did today. I better do something about that." If you do not like the ending of your dream, you can change it. By changing the ending of your dream, you will change your karma before you have to experience the incident again. You can avoid the karmic result that you set up in the future. This works because by changing the outcome ofthe dream, you have changed your relationship to the lesson the dream was describing, and you no longer need the effect ofthe dream to convince you. When you have learned the lesson, you do not need to repeat it. You already have met the karma and overcome. This is the Law of Grace. You change your karma and invoke the Law of Grace when you see the result of what you did and change because of it. If that does not give you enough impetus to get in touch with your dreams, I cannot imagine what would. Your dreams for that reason are some of the most effective means you can have for getting in touch with your life. They give you a running account of where you have been and where you are going. You may still meet the same experience and/or people the following day, but it will not have the charge it had in the past. You will notice it, perhaps, but the emotional reaction will not be there. You can enhance your dream life by becoming more aware of the events of your day and your response to them. I highly recommend that you keep a journal and each night briefly record the experiences of your day noting the people and situations that caused a reaction in you. By following this procedure, you are communicating with your Subconscious Mind, bringing patterns into your Conscious Mind and relating the two ofthem to your Superconscious Mind. You actually are holistically bringing all the aspects of your consciousness together by combining your subconscious symbology from your dreams with the conscious activities ofthe day and interactions with people. You are putting it all in one place.
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Most people sleep by accident rather than on purpose. You spend a third of your lifetime sleeping, and if that time is wasted, you literally have thrown away a third of a lifetime. What is more precious than your opportunity of this lifetime? You can prepare yourself for sleep and the dream process every night. To use your dreamtime most effectively, you can follow this procedure: First, prepare the area surrounding your bed with your expectancy that you will wake up in the middle ofthe night with an important dream. Keep a journal beside your bed and before you go to sleep, open it to the page where you will record your dreams. Date the page, put a light and a pen in a convenient place, and tell yourself you are prepared to dream. Then, go through the Balanced Relaxation process. Balanced Relaxation is so important, I cannot emphasize it too much. If you are filled with stress from the tensions of the day or with chemical imbalance from a heavy meal before bedtime, your dreams have to deal with the body first. Next, go through your terraces into your Temple, where you will sleep. In your temple, attune your consciousness by saying, in your own words, to the Source of your being, "I'm entering sleep now, and I want to listen to what you have to tell me tonight." Either say it aloud or write it in your journal as you would relate to a very wise instructor, a confident, a counselor. Make your communication direct and meaningful, not just symbolic. Tell him that you want to make use of the time you are asleep. Then, review the incidents of the day that concern you, and ask to understand them better. Aim your consciousness where you want it to go in sleep. You are reporting to a classroom, consciously putting yourself in the hands of a teacher. Your dreams will follow the activities of the day, and if you want high spiritual instructive dreams, then set your consciousness as you enter sleep. But remember, your experience in sleep is a result of what happens when you are awake. It is not possible to be disoriented and unspiritual all day, and suddenly become spiritual at night in your dreams. When you wake up in the morning, you still will be in your Temple. Record your dreams before you come down the mountainside. Come down through the terraces bringing with you the consciousness of the Temple to guide your activities. It is the best formula I know to set the stage for your day. If, even after all of this preparation you still do not remember a dream, write in your journal, again in your own words, "I know I dreamed last night. I do not remember the dream consciously, but I want to remember. I will persist until I succeed." After a couple of days, if you still do not remember dreaming, it is time for rather radical action. Set your alarm clock for the middle of the night, several hours after you go to sleep. You should remember your dream when you are awakened. If you still do not recall your dream, write an entry in your journal. "I know I dreamed. I will remember." If this procedure still does not work for you, increase the number of times you set your alarm during the night. I know one or two people that had to set the alarm for every hour to jolt their consciousness into remembering. But after a few very difficult nights, they began to remember their dreams regularly.
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Dreams are the language of the gods. The God in you does everything He can to communicate with you, but whether you listen or not is your decision.
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Emotions
NINE STEP PROCESS THE NINE-STEP PROCESS FOR MASTERING EMOTIONS
This outline of the Nine-Step Process is designed to be used as a Guide in assisting another in using the Process or in using it yourself. STEP 1. RECOGNIZE YOU ARE BEING EMOTIONAL Determine the earliest moment of recognition that you were not feeling as you would like to feel. Notice where this disharmony is expressing in your body. STEP 2. LABEL NEGGATIVE EMOTION NEGATIVELY Describe your emotion as being socially unacceptable, which It is. Use the list of Emotions Definitions for this Step. STEP 3. ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR EMOTION
Assume total responsibility for your decision to express an emotion. Realize that it was your choice; that you can choose to respond whatever way you choose regardless of what "they" did. STEP 4. IDENTIFY THE CATALYST
Ascertain the exact incident or communication that caused you to decide to respond with an emotional reaction. Describe this experience objectively. This catalyst is What you used to call the "cause" of your emotion. STEP 5. IDENTIFY THE CAUSE
The real cause of your emotional reaction is a belief that you hold about the catalyst. Because of your belief about the catalyst, you feel you must respond in a certain way to get a particular result or to rectify the situation. STEP 6. IS YOUR BELIEF VALID? D O ESITSERV E YOU?
Now examine the validity of the belief. Is your belief about the catalyst rational? Does this belief serve you? Does this belief bring more joy into your life? If it doesn't, decide to get rid of it. STEP 7 IDENTIFY THE CARROT
What is the cause/effect relationship of your emotional reaction? What did you hope to get?
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STEP 8.
DID YOU GET YOUR CARROT?
What is the cause/effect relationship of your emotional reaction? Did the emotion produce the result you wanted? If not, what did it produce instead? If it did produce what you wanted, do you still want that result? STEP 9. NEW RESPONSE
If the emotional reaction did not work for you; if it caused suffering to yourself and the other person, you will want to choose a new response to bring the desired results. Make a decision. What can you do to make your life work more effectively?
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Emotions
Remembering Truth In all of these things I think it is important for any teacher to say that the ideas that I express may not be correct. The important thing to do is consider the possibility of what I say and try that with your feelings. Something that I believe about all human beings is that we have an inherent ability to recognize truth. The recognition of truth is an experience that feels like remembering, it feels like something that you already knew and it's as if you're being reminded. It doesn't feel as if you're hearing something brand new. It like, "Oh! I rememberthat from somewhere." That ability to recognize truth comes from something inside that the ancients called the "Akashic Record" within you. There is a Record written in your consciousness of where you came from. Very often, the hearing of truth can open the door to that Record and you feel this remembrance. In fact, Jesus Christ used that illustration in particular, when he said to his apostles, "I'm leaving now but I'm leaving you an ability that will be really important to you. I leave a spirit of wholeness in you and that spirit will cause you to remember all things that you will ever need to know all the way back to the foundations of the world." So, you have this memory in you that will allow you to recognize things as being true. Even if you can't put them in a laboratory and test the truthfulness of them, something rings true inside. Getting in touch with the InnerTeacher. What we want to do is go from sensory reality, this is at the meadow and at the bottom of the mountain, we want to go through the stages of consciousness releasing our belief systems, getting in touch with an inner teacher, a guide, and opening ourselves to possibilities of discovery. Then we go inside the Temple. This Temple you can consider the cranium if you like. Contained within the temple is a consciousness or a spirit of wholeness, a spirit that has information for you. The Akashic Record There are two qualities that I would like you to know about this source of information. One of the qualities is called "a Hall of Records", a library, stored information. The ancients called this the Akashic Record, the Great Akasha. The Akashic Record, to give a literal definition for that word, the word means "the invisible record of thought and action written on the skein of time and space." That may not mean anything to you. If it doesn't then I'll further explain it. What that means is something like this. When ever you think or act your brain produces an electrical impulse, an electrical charge. So right now while we're thinking in this room our brains are discharging electricity. The electricity discharged by the brain is peculiar to the thought that released that charge of activity. That means that different thoughts produce different qualities, different strengths of electricity. The more emotional the thought the greater the amperage of the electricity, and thoughts that are acted upon produce a greater amperage of electricity than those that are simply thoughts not acted upon. So we are producing these various different electrical charges that have different qualities and different strength. While we're doing that we are surrounded by molecular structure, which is to say the walls, the ceiling, the floors and your own physical body. Those structures, both your body and the physical structures around
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you, are changing constantly. They are not static. They are not simply solid. They are whirling atoms of energy constantly in activity and constantly changing their relationship with one another. Molecules are breaking down constantly in the walls and the ceiling and the floor of this room where we are. Activity is going on. Molecules are breaking down and new molecules are being formed. The atoms are rebonding themselves in new ways. It is a process of decay and a process of change. Now, when these atoms bond themselves together they form their bond within an electrical matrix. The electricity that is present at the moment of their bonding influences the way that they bond. Now, what that means is that your thoughts are being, literally, recorded into the substance of the walls and the floors of this room and the chairs in which you sit. Interesting thing is that if you got up and left your seat and we came back in as much as 24 hours with an infrared camera and took a photograph ofthe seat, we would still get an image of you sitting in that chair. This happens because you have produced a force field that attaches itself to the material around you. Now, this force field actually goes into the structure of the room itself and effects the structure. The ancient teachers called those records of thought and action that become encased in the molecular and atomic structure of the earth itself the Akashic Record. So the earth itself contains a Record of everything that has been thought or done on the earth. An interesting thing about this Record that is written into physical things is that there are some people who can hold a physical object and by disinhibiting their cerebral cortex can release the record that is written in that object, impressions, ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions, that are recorded in that object then are registered in their mind and they speak of them and they can tell you, largely, the history of the object. Psychometry That activity is called Psychometry. It is not an ability that is peculiar to certain people as if they were a different species. Some people are called "psychic" as if there are human beings over here and there are psychics over there. That's not the situation. The situation is that all of us have this ability and use it more or less depending upon how much we are dependent upon that activity for our feelings and our ideas and our impressions and so on. And it has largely to do with a decision within us. Not so much a conscious decision due to the way we grow up and the influences that affect us in our growing up. Some people are much more affected by the energies of their surroundings than others. And those who are affected by the energies of their surroundings tend to retain the ability to touch and be influenced by that surrounding. But all of you have felt this at one time or another; if you've ever gone into perhaps a great cathedral, a church, in which people have worshiped for centuries, going into that building, will cause you to feel something in the atmosphere. What you're doing when you feel that is psychometry. You are feeling the emotions that have been stored there. Or take it out of a religious context and lets say you walk into a room somewhere where you've never been before. There's nothing about the physical surrounding of the room that is peculiar or particularly stands out to you, except that when you walk into the room you feel uncomfortable. There's just something about the atmosphere that you don't feel good about. You wonder why? It is very likely that you are psychometrizing the room, not intentionally, but those senses, those abilities are working in you. That ability, the mechanism that you use to psychometrize is the same mechanism that you use to remember. The psychometists ability is really memory ability. I'll try to explain it this way. In recent years psychological researchers have believed that in the brain there are billions, literally billions, of microscopic cells, so tiny that you'll need a microscope to see them. These microscopic cells are memory cells and somehow this minute, microscopic cell has an ability to record within itself miles of space and perhaps
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minutes, hours, days, weeks or even years of time compressed into that single microscopic cell. So when your consciousness goes to that particular cell to release its memory, you may remember a time when you were standing on a high mountain and you could see for miles in the distance. And when you release that energy, you release those miles of space from a microscopic cell. Isn't that amazing? But you can do it. You have done it. You've had that experience. Memories are stored in these microscopic memory cells. Interesting thing is that more recently psychological researchers have discovered that, well, let me back up a moment. The reason that researchers believe that these memory cells were in the brain and could release these memories in this way is because they took tiny probes, microscopic instruments capable of touching a single cell, and when they touched that cell to stimulate it, it would release all of the memory in that cell. So the belief was that the brain contains these billions of memory cells. More recently they have discovered that when you take a probe and touch a cell elsewhere in the body you do the same thing. Which is to say, your entire body has memory cells all over it. And they've discovered that different kinds of memories, different qualities of memories, are stored in different places in the body, depending on the way that we express ourselves in relation to different kinds of emotions and so on. This suggests that your whole body is one great memory storage bank and that the cells of your body contain memories of thoughts and actions that you have had. Things that you have thought and done all the way back to birth and, for those of you who believe in reincarnation, beyond. Reincarnation When you formed the original cells of your body you brought forward memories from the past and stored those in the memory cells of the body that you were creating. So that your body contains all the memories of this life and of past experiences, assuming that you have had that. If you don't believe in reincarnation you can explain that phenomenon another way but the memory is there anyhow. Find a different explanation for it. That is valid. There are people, for example, who believe that these memories, earlier memories, come from something called "race consciousness." That is not an individual memory but a universal consciousness that is stored in the body. If that's a preferable explanation for you, use that one. But the point that I'm making is that your whole body contains memories of thought and action including every single thought that you have ever thought in your life, it's recorded in you. Now, just as your entire body is made of cells capable of containing memories so are rocks and trees and walls and floors. Those cells are memory cells too. And in order to unlock the memory in one of those cells the process that you use is the same process by which you unlocked memoryfrom cells in your body. You remember it. Now, if you hold an object to psychometrize it, there is one of two things that you can do. You can hold that object and you can look at it and logically you can try to figure out and guess about its background. That's a left-brain process. It's not a memory process. It's a logical reasoning process. Or, you can hold that object and perhaps close your eyes and make no attempt to try to figure out anything but sort of throw your brain out of gear by one process or another. You can use a mantra process. You can use a meditation process. You can use any kind of process that disinhibits the cerebral cortex. And while you are not thinking logically but are open and receptive, you can allow images and feelings to come into your mind just like memories as if you were remembering something. Very often you remember things in bits and pieces. You get an image or a feeling and you can't remember where that was or what that was. That feeling is the way that these memories are unlocked from physical objects.
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The Hall of Records This process of psychometry is something that you can do not just by holding an object in your hand but you can do it with the earth itself. In other words, you can go inside yourself, into what we call the Temple. The format that I prefer to use is to go to the top of the mountain [in meditation]* and then go inside this Temple. Within the Temple there is a library, a Hall of Records. You open this door to the library and you go inside. Inside the library there is a librarian. There's a presence there, a being. This librarian's purpose is to respond to you when you ask for a particular kind of memory. You may ask to remember things about yourself, what is my purpose here? What are the things that I need to know about my body? What have I done to my body that I need to do differently now? What are the things that I need to know about my emotions, my relationships, what do I need to know about myself? Ask this librarian to bring you a book about yourself. You may get an image, if you're imaging this, of a literal book or it may not be. You may not see a book at all. You are asking for information, not words. But as this librarian brings you this source of information, whatever it is, you want to do the same thing that you do in trying to remember an event. You stop thinking logically about what's going on know and you try to recall and you allow images, ideas, thoughts and so on, to come. Allowing those thoughts to come either about yourself, your personal life, or about earth or whatever, allowing those images to come is called "reading from the Akashic record." You are allowing information to come from the record written into the earth, the atmosphere, about you. The Essenes There are a number of books that have been written about reading from the Akashic Record. These are books in which people who have developed this skill, this ability to unlock these images and feelings from the Akashic Record, have asked perhaps about a particular time in history or a particular thing that happened. One example of this is the man named Edgar Cayce who produced a tranced state, went into such a library and asked about the period of time in which Jesus Christ lived. There were several questions that were presented to him about this period of time. He described a group of people called the Essenes and he described a community where they lived on the shores of the Dead Sea. He said that this community was a community of men, women and children. He described records that they had made and the activities of the community. The thing that's spectacular about that is that at the time that he first talked about this, there was no historical record of the existence of these people. There were ruins there that had been considered a monastery. The archeologists said that there were only men there and that it was a monastery of some peculiar sect. In fact, they did know the name Essene, but they didn't know any more than that about the community. They did not know that there were men, women and children there and they did not know about the records that they had written and stored until about five years after Edgar Cayce described this. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found. And they contained the information that this man had gotten from the Akashic Record five years before researchers and archeologists discovered proof of what he had said. That's not the only instance of reading from the Akashic Record. Its been done by quite a number of people in different instances, different periods of time. But that's what the process is like. Unlocking Ourselves What does reading from the Akashic Record have to do with you? First of all, there are a lot of things that would be valuable for you to know about yourself, about what you have done with your opportunities, what your purpose in life is, perhaps. One of the most valuable things that we can know is more about
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ourselves, because we have an amazing ability to hide from ourselves what we don't want to admit or what we don't want to deal with. As a result, instead of learning to overcome habits that are working against us, we continue and repeat those habits because we don't see them as other people see them and we don't see them in the perspective of what they are doing to us. If we can unlock this understanding of ourselves then we can get to know better what we have done with our body, what we have done with our opportunities, perhaps what the next step is. In fact, this process can be used for remembering past lives, if that happens to be a direction that you're interested in. But there is another aspect to this Akashic Record that may be a little more difficult to understand. According to the teachers who explain the Akashic Record there is another quality of this Record that does not come from the past; it could be described like this. If a sculptor creates a sculpture, he expresses himself in it. And if you psychometrize that sculpture you won't get the history of the stone but you will, instead, get in touch with the mind of the sculptor. You will make a link with how he thinks,not only what he was thinking in creating this sculpture but you will get in touch with what he wanted the sculpture to do. So you are looking at the future of the sculpture from the point of view of the mind or the preference of its creator. According to those who write about the Akashic Record the earth is a sculpture created by a Master Creator. And He expressed himself in it. By psychometrizing I the earth you can get in touch with His purpose, His mind and His thoughts about creating it - its purpose and its future. So, in other words, getting in touch with the Akashic Record not only tells us about the thoughts and actions of people who have lived on earth, including ourselves, but it also tells us about the Mind of God - His purpose in the creation of the earth. We tune into a thinking process, the thought process of the Creator of the Record, or the Creator of the earth. Prophecy The Akashic Record it has been used for prophecy. One question that always comes up is "How is prophecy possible? Is the future already set? Is it already decided? Is there nothing we can do about it?" Probably a better way to look at that is that the future is a product of the past plus the present. Which means that the past sets up an opportunity, in the present we have done something about that opportunity, which produces the future. The future is a result of our actions in the present upon the opportunities ofthe past. By looking at our activities on the past we can discern what the future might be. And that prophecy might not be specifically accurate. One of the remarks about prophecy that I think is important - from my own Readings, the Source once said that a prophecy that is fulfilled exactly as it was prophesied is a prophecy that failed. There are two reasons for prophecy. One is to warn of an event that should not happen, thus giving people an opportunity to take an action to prevent it happening. So if it does happen in spite of that, then the prophecy failed in its purpose. The other reason is to warn people of an event that is about to happen thus giving them time to get ready for that event, so that you take the sting or the pain out of the event. In either case, you have changed the event by the prophecy, if it succeeds. So the purpose of prophecy is not to prove that you can be accurate in prophesying something, but rather, to get a look at where conditions are leading us so that we can respond appropriately and perhaps change the result that we have set in motion. I'm sharing all of those ideas with you to say this. The library, the Hall of Records, and the Temple that we are about to visit in meditation are not imaginary. They are real. The image that you see, the image that you create in your mind, you may consider imaginary. That's fine. It's a symbol. But what it symbolizes really does exist. There really is, for example, a Temple, a structure in which a spirit lives. This Temple you do not have to consider a physical structure. You don't have to make it your cranium or your physical
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body, but it is the container that is you and has within it a spirit that is the spirit of the creator of you. Just as any sculpture contains the spirit of its creator so you contain the spirit of the Source of your being. And you are the Temple in which that's contained. There is also inside that Temple, quite literally, a library, a storage place, of information. That's not imaginary. It's real. The images that you use for it are probably not literal. Those who go and read from a great book are not reading from a literal book, they are reading the information contained in the book. When they see a book they are interpreting a symbol in order to release the information. But the storage of information is really there. The library really does exist. I think that it's vitally important for you to realize that. Do not think of it as imaginary or you will get results that are imaginary. Know that you really are going to a Temple that there really is a spirit in that Temple and that spirit is a spirit of wisdom.
*See the ILC Seven Terrace Meditation.
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Emotions
TRANSCENDENTALISM HOW TO BECOME A MASTER Three factors or qualities are necessary to transcendentalism. The first is mastery, which includes dignity and quality. The second is the self-talk affirmation, "I can handle it": The third is the self-talk affirmation, "This too shall pass." WHY NOT BECOME A MASTER? I am making an assumption, which may not always be correct, that each of you is committed to becoming a Master. If you are not, there are generally three reasons. These are: 1. 2. 3. You don't believe you can. You don't believe that it is worth going through the necessary discipline. You don't know how to go about it, where to start, what area to choose and how difficult it may be.
A MASTER OF WHAT? The first question may be, "A master of what?" What, surprisingly, is not terribly important. You could be a master house painter, clock builder or chef, a master housekeeper and decorator, a master at T'ai Chi, the I Ching, Astrology, Tarot, Qaballah or of music. It doesn't matter. Just pick a particular art or science, a creative form or craft in which mastery can exist. ONLY TWO CHOICES There are two kinds of individuals. There is the ordinary person who is not a master, who has done perhaps a lot of things or only a few. Whether a lot or a few, he has gone only a certain distance in mastering a craft, just far enough to be acceptable in it. He has gone as far as he has had to, and most likely believes it's the best that he can hope for. He believes that there's too much involved in achieving mastery and that he doesn't have the time or the energy to be a master. You are either a master or a victim. You don't have a choice. And, if you want life to work for you, there is only one choice. Being a master does not mean that you have to master all of your emotions, communication skills, the environment and become a Meta-Human, although if you begin by mastering one area you may want to tackle them all. An area That Cannot Defeat You If you have mastered anything, that means you have one chunk of life, one activity that cannot defeat you. It may provide challenges, but the nature of your relationship with it is that you become an authority on the subject and are confident in your ability to exercise any aspect of it. You are a source of inspiration, knowledge and teaching in that area.
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For example, if you decide to become a master chef, you will not only learn to be a superb cook, but will learn all the tricks of the trade. You will learn combinations of spices and herbs, cooking temperatures and times, how to run a kitchen, how to keep it clean, how to buy and maintain inventory and stock, everything else involved in the art. In the moment of mastery that person takes complete control of a mini-universe and as a result the quality of individual changes and transcendence begins. When a person walks into the kitchen that is run by a master, he notices first that everything is under control. Then, he notices a quality in the environment that is unusual. In spite of the fact that running a kitchen can be fast, furious and demanding, there is a quality that comes from a kitchen in which a master is working that is peaceful, serene and secure. In the presence of a master, other people who are not masters feel secure. QUALITY AND DIGNITY When you have demanded of yourself that level of quality in just one distinct area of life, you will relate to all other areas in a different way. It means you will start looking for quality, dignity, and mastery in everything else that comes into your life. If you master one thing, you will have proven that you are capable of mastery. Mastery is the single greatest key to self-confidence and transcendence. Learn one thing and master it so extremely well that other people consider you to be the ultimate authority of it. Mastering it does not mean just do it well. A person has not mastered a thing until he is the best in the world, the world's leading authority at doing that thing. That is quite literal. It is possible to become the world's expert in a particular area because it is so seldom done and that leaves many areas in which it is available to be done. THE 'BIG LEAGUE' A person who has mastered a craft, an art, any one thing in life, can walk into any strata of society. For example, if you are a master woodcutter and you walk into a cocktail party where there are diplomats and professors and scientists, 'Big Leagues,' the fact that you are a master craftsman announces to them something of who you are. It may not matter to them that you are a woodcutter. They may not be interested in woodcutting and they may not be there because they want to know how to cut wood, yet when they encounter you they have encountered a presence, a personality, a character that has had the experience of mastering something and people recognize that. Because you have mastered something, you fit into their structure of acceptability, of responsibility, of quality and of dignity. It gives you the key to commanding respect even if you don't have expertise in all of the fields they have expertise in. The mastery of any one thing in your life will give you one of the keys of the ability to think. It means you have taken information, translated knowledge into understanding and understanding into wisdom. When the wisdom stage is reached in your specific area, you have achieved mastery. When you have wisdom, you can switch over into other areas and master them with relative ease. The mastery mind will master many things. That is the first step to transcendentalism. If you can pick one area and master it, then the others will be subdued at your feet.
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A MASTER OF TWO MASTERS For example, if a master musician discussed music with a master astronomer who doesn't know a thing about music, the discussion would be a hundred percent more interesting than a master musician discussing music with a music student. It is because the conversation is between two masters, even though they are masters of different subjects. Because the scientist has used his mind to master astronomy, he has a trained mind which is now curious and which reaches out to grab whole quanta of information. By mastering one subject, the scientist produces spaces in his mind, which we are calling a system of correspondences. When the scientist listens to the master musician discuss music, he takes his structures or system of correspondences from the cosmology and relates what he knows to the new information. If the musician does all of the talking, at the end of the conversation the master astronomer will not only know more about astronomy, but will know more about music theory than the master musician because the musician does not know astronomy. If you take music and astronomy and marry them with knowledge, then you will know more about music because you have a pre-built system of correspondences on which to put the chromatic scale. On the other hand, when the master musician listens to the astronomer talk about cosmology, he will hear things you definitely will not hear, not having the system of harmonics of music, which are universal structure. The conversation between the two men seems to take place in a language that you hardly understand, unless, of course, you, too, are a master. "I CAN HANDLE IT" Most people advertise their limits. When you tell others what you can handle and what you can't, you are announcing to yourself and to the world where your limitations are. You are tempting life to test them. The average person is full of fears, which say, "I can handle this much of life, but if this happened, I couldn't handle it." This self-talk sets up the point beyond which you cannot transcend. Whatever that point is, it is the point of your karmic lessons. The working knowledge of "I can handle it" is the second key to developing the transcendental mind. Make sure you have applied that statement to every scenario that is imaginable in your life structure. If you know, not wish, but know, and have decided that whatever comes, "I can handle it," then you have prepared the foundation for transcendence. You are not giving to anything, to anyone, to any situation or circumstance the ability to defeat you. You are not assigning limitations. If you can so program the statement, "I can handle it," into your consciousness that it becomes a belief regarding any challenge that can come into your life, you have the quality that is required for mastery. Mastery is a step in transcendence. Mastery is "I can handle it." DEALING WITH LIMITATION AND LACK There are two ways, for example, to deal with lack of prosperity. One way to deal with prosperity is to use manipulation or 'trying' to become rich. The other way is to know that "I can handle it." To know that "I can handle it," is to accept things as they are, to understand that whatever the level of poverty you can live with it and you can transcend it. You can live in heaven ifyou are rich or not. Once that state of mind is achieved you can bring prosperity to you as well. But people attempting to use extraordinary techniques without first accepting things as they are and overcoming, will bring fear
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and anxiety into their processes, and it will seem as if the processes don't work. Knowing that you can live with poverty may sound like settling for less, but it is building a foundation for bringing prosperity to you. People are suffering in the world around you because they are saying, "I can't handle it. I don't know what to do next. It is defeating me." Using these negative self-affirmations perpetuates victim consciousness. They are empowering war, crime and illness. If people could only know that whatever comes, no matter what it is, earthquakes, world war, separation, divorce, death in the family, being alone, losing their health or their money, they can handle it. Not only handle it, but also transcend it and live a quality life with dignity, joy and abundance, in spite of conditions. There are several reasons why people set up masochistic situations that don't work. One is that they believe they need to be punished or to suffer in order to be made better. Another is that they are challenging themselves to bite off something unrealistic, thinking, "If I can achieve this, I will be alright. It might just be that they bite off a challenge that was inappropriate. Meeting that challenge might be to discard something, knowing that they can handle living with it or living without it. Eliminate those areas that you are saying you can't handle. Either decide to handle it or get rid of it. Why do people choose to think they can't handle it? There is a common belief that if they scream loud enough, God up there in the sky will hear and change the requirement. "God, why are you doing this to me? This is miserable, unfair, etc." That will not change the situation, yet virtually everybody does it. It is another way of avoiding taking responsibility for life, or even making a decision about life. YOU WILL HANDLE IT You can establish the fact that you can handle it by giving up your criteria for what "handling it" means. Recognize the truth. When the situation has passed, you will have handled it. You may have done so poorly, but you had to handle it. For example, one of the ways to handle poverty is to go through bankruptcy. If you do go through bankruptcy, you have handled it. People have handled it by going into mental institutions. That may not be a superior way to handle it, but it is a way. 'THIS TOO WILL PASS' This simple little statement, "I can handle it," can get you through any situation even if it seems like the greatest of all disasters at the time. Knowing that you can handle it can be the one thing that brings you through with dignity. Then, know as well, "This too will pass." It may seem horrendous in the moment, but it will end. Nothing is permanent, neither sorrows nor joys. Knowing a situation will end, knowing that you will handle it, and having made the decision, "I can handle it," the next question becomes "How do I want to do so?" If that first decision is "What if I can't handle it?" the second question is pointless. Get past the question of whether you can handle it. You can and you will. You don't have a choice. The only question is "Will you handle it well?" The only requirement for handling it well is that you enjoy the challenge and congratulate, support and encourage yourself in the process to change whatever the situation may be into a joyous experience. That's the power of the magician. THE TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE When you have made the decision that "You can handle it," and you have created the system of correspondences, the spaces in your mind that are ready to be filled with new knowledge, when you
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have mastered a subject to the extent that you have learned everything available that man already has discovered about the subject, then the door will be opened for the Christ to add the rest. That's transcendence. You go beyond the limits of all experience or knowledge thought to be humanly possible, to the Source of that knowledge. One who has mastered a subject then has gained a thorough understanding. A Master is one who has overcome. He has transcended. He has risen above and beyond the limits of human consciousness. There is a story, for example, of a paleontologist who was studying fossils. He had a partial fossil of a fish and it wasn't enough to complete the form and classify it properly. He studied all he could about it and then asked the Christ for help. He dreamed the rest of the fossil and the next day he was able to draw it. TRANSFORMING YOUR MIND Once you have mastered one area, you have conditioned your mind, your body and your craft. You have taught your mind to think and have built a confidence that you can think. Mastery of yourself is then likely to come in the process of mastering something else and it will come considerably easier than just "working on yourself." Mastering something else gives you a system of discipline through which you can master yourself as well. It gives you the key to transforming your mind so that you have something to contribute, a gift to give the world. And, probably not surprisingly, that gift may not even be in your original area of mastery. A RELATIONSHIP WITH LOVE If you have formed a personal relationship with Love, then Love can enter. The personal relationship with Love is the other pre-requisite for becoming a Master, a Meta-Human. Choosing to support and nurture life instead of living in fear and dread, knowing that Love is stronger than fear and can empower life, you will know the Source of guidance, leadership and healing. It is the key to emotions management and to making relationships work. It is the key to transcendentalism. These are the steps. The rest is up to you. You can use these tools or you don't have to. The important thing is to be Emotional and Love It.
Note. A Meta-Human is a person who has mastered the laws of cause and effect through contact with an "Inner Light." He has undergone the transcendental experience. See THE META-HUMAN by Paul Solomon.
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Dreams
The Great Akasha The Meaning of Dreams By Paul Solomon
We are here for a purpose, every one of us. I think you came here to do something. You have a job to do. You have a job that you have co-selected, You helped to pick it out. You prepared your body for it. As you prepared your physical body in this time, as you put the energy into putting cells together and forming the organs and the nerves and the the abilities, the inclinations, talents that went into you, you created an instrument that was specifically designed to do a particular job. And everything that you would need to do that job is built into that body. It's a pretty special instrument, and I think that that's a very good reason for considering the body that you have, the talents and abilities, the thinking ability that you have, all of the things that are available to you as instruments in this time. It's pretty important for the workman to know that for the job he has to do, he has the perfect tools. For the accomplishment of any job it is important to have the right tools. But can you imagine this? If a master craftsman was assigned to a task and then given tools, ifthat craftsman didn't believe that those tools were sufficient, if he despised his tools, could he very well do that job? Now considerthat in light ofthis. Most people that I know, especially spiritual people, are inclined to be a little bit self-effacing. You say anything about their body, their talents, their mental abilities, and they say, "Well sure, you have a talent, you can do that. But look at me. I can't, I'm not much." How would you feel if you were the creator of a perfect instrument? You book time with it. You fashioned it, lovingly, and made it as a gift that you gave to this person to do a job. And that person who received it said, "Oh, that's not much. This old thing? How can I accomplish anything with this?" It sounds like the words of an unappreciative soul, doesn't it? I think that's the place we might start. Start by looking at the instrument that you've been given: your body, your mind, your spirit, your consciousness, your emotions, your talents and your inclinations. And just begin with the assumption, that included in yourtools is every single thing that you need to accomplish the job that you came to do in this time. And for you to spend time wishing that you had tools, talents or inclinations that somebody else has to do the job that they have to do, is to waste time in not using the instruments and tools that you've been given to do your job.
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Now that's almost a universal preoccupation. Everybody is wishing they had someone else's tools and someone else's job when they have an instrument that is perfectly suited to doing the job they came to
Now, accepting the tools that you have is the first step toward getting a glimpse at the Akashic Record. Looking at what you've been given and asking the question, "What job have I come to do with this instrument?" That's a place to start in understanding soul purpose. Let's go a little further in understanding what the Record itself is. The Scripture reading this morning couldn't have been more perfect, talking about the book with seven seals. And the man who saw the seals and discovered the books, said, - just like the soul that says, "If I could just understand my purpose..." He said, "Oh, woe is me. I can't open these seals. I can't see what is written within me as my purpose. And while he was crying, there was a teacher, the Master of Masters who came and said, 'But I can open those seals.' "And the angels came and gave him permission. 'Yes, you're the one who has earned the right, through perfection. You can open the seals.'" And the message to the soul who becomes aware is: " I have a purpose, but seven seals seal it off from me. Each one of those seals is a seal of the soul on its way to perfection. If all seven seals were opened then I would have accomplished the growth ofthe seven dimensions ofthe soul. I will be perfect by then, so why would I need to find out what my purpose is? I will already have accomplished it. What I need to know now is what I need to do to open those seven seals." The soul who thinks that he can undertake that job of opening those seven seals himself is first of all exceptionally egotistical, arrogant, presumptuous and then foolish and self-defeating as well. To think that we can open those seals before we have come to the point of growing into the job that we have to do is foolish. We are not going to be able to read the Record until we have harmonized with the Record itself. That really says that we can't find out the job that we have to do until we're doing the job. Now isn't that a heck of a position to be in? But that's where the soul finds itself. Then what do we do? The first step is making contact with the man big enough to open the book. Make contact with that consciousness. As a matter offact, the consciousness that sealed the books is available to you and that's the consciousness of Him who overcame - the Christ Consciousness. The One who is beyond the seals. The one who is lower than the seals, the false self, the soul in incarnation, the soul who has become the slave of the flesh and has built around himself a case, a sheet that has closed his eyes to his own experience, that soul can't read from the Record. But the beginning of that soul, the Source of that soul, that which gave birth to the soul in the beginning, that is a consciousness of God, a Creative Consciousness. That being not only can read the Record, but also participated in the writing of the Record. And participated in the sealing of it.
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It's rather like a student in the mystery schools who goes before a teacher to learn, and the teacher designs lessons for him. And the student, of course, is always hopeful that the teacher will say to him, "This is a lesson. It is happening so that you can respond to it properly." But the mystery school teachers never did that. They put out the lesson in front ofthe student and it was sealed with a seal, meaning that the student almost never recognized that it was a lesson. It was something that simply happened in his life; he would suddenly come across an incident that he had to respond to. He had no idea that the teacher had created it and put it there. He had no idea that he was going to be graded for the way that he handled the situation. So the lesson was there but it was sealed from his consciousness by the fact that he was not told, "This is a lesson." Now understand this point because this is really important in your personal relationship with the Akashic Record - Your soul purpose is put smack in front of you, so close to you, so obviously before you, that you cannot avoid running into it. But it does not bear a label saying, "This is soul purpose." Your soul purpose is sealed with a seal, which is obvious to the man who unfolds the opportunities of life believing that they must be important or they wouldn't be happening." He need not read about it in the Record. That would defeat the purpose anyway. Supposing a student did know that each incident in life was a lesson, supposing that the teacher said and teachers are tempted to, I want you to know - Teachers are always tempted to say to the student, "Now be careful when you run into that. That's a lesson." "Oh, well, if it's a lesson, I'll respond to it this way. But, if it's just something happening in my life, then I'm not going to pay much attention to it." Isn't it a shame that we miss the lesson in these incidents that happen to us and later we say, "Oh, I wish I'd known that that was a lesson ... I wouldn't have acted that way if I had known the Teacher had designed it and put it there. I thought he was really mad at me or I wouldn't have treated him that way." You know, when you know that it's a lesson, the lesson becomes invalid. It might help you in going through life to keep in mind that the learning that matters, soul learning, is not conceptual. It's experiential. So it's not a matter of getting a package describing the process. Nearly everyone feels, "If I could just have a Life Reading... if only Edgar Cayce were still alive I could ask him what I'm here for. If I had that, I'd have the tools, a handle on my life, m yjob, I'd know what to do." Well, if that happened, it could take away some of your opportunity of bright discovery. That life purpose would then bear a label, "This is life purpose. This is a lesson." And you would meet that lesson like someone who has been given that crutch; you may be even weakened by it. Because now you're doing that job not because the job was put before you and given to you as an opportunity, but because you were told, "This is your job."
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Instead, how about getting up in the morning knowing, "This day is a day spent in a Divine School, with an excellent teacher who chose this day for me and designed into it some lessons." Exciting day. I wake up this morning knowing that as I leave my bed, as I leave my home and move through the day, incidents are going to occur, one after another. I am going to meet people. I will not meet a single one on the sidewalk, in the street, in the market, wherever I go, I won't meet a single person that has not been selected by my teacher. Each person will be carefully selected and put there for me, for my growth. And each incident happening today is happening for a purpose. I will assume that if it happens, it's a lesson and it is my opportunity to respond to it appropriately so that life itself becomes alive. As I meet each incident, as I see what life is saying to me, I am in fact, accomplishing that challenge. I am reading the Akashic Record right out of life itself. Life is talking to me. Life is opening up the Record and revealing itself to me as I approach it in that spirit ofchallenge. And recognizing the teacher, getting to know that teacher comes, in fact, from watching what he is saying to me in the lessons of the day. It's a beginning to know, "I have a teacher, a perfect teacher, a master teacher who is designing my life every day." The same teacher that helped me in the creation of this physical body, that put into it the talents and abilities and inclinations needed to do this job, that same teacher is participating today in putting challenges and lessons before me. So I'm learning from, I'm responding to that teacher who the angels said could open the seal. I'm saying, "I can't open the Record, but Christ can." Then what I must do is contact that Christ Consciousness and get the Christ to open the Record for me or read the Record through His eyes, as suggested in the Scripture reading this morning. He has paid the price. He has opened the seals. He can read from the book. He can read from the book for me and to me. Even if I could get to that level of becoming aware of the Record, I would not be able to read from it. I would need someone to interpret it, someone who is authorized to open the seals and speak. To really know, to be aware in my heart of what the Record is saying, I have to read it through the eyes of the Christ. Through the eyes of the Christ might mean this: That I assume that every person who comes into my life today, every incident, was selected by a teacher who is trying to communicate with me, so every time I meet a person or approach a situation I will look at it to see what it is saying to me and I will respond appropriately. And in doing that, I will come to know the teacher that selected the lesson, that put it there. The way to obtain a personal relationship with the Source of your being is through what the Source of your being is saying to you. Your Source is speaking to you through the incidents that have been put before you. All of us, perhaps, want to be psychic. We want to hear a little inner voice using words that say, in verbal messages, "This is this and this is that. And now you move through that and take these steps." We want to hear the words.
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Something far more efficient than the words of a psychic; something far more efficient than voices you can listen to is already communicating with you, communicating in concrete terminology, more concrete than words, more literal than words, more revealing than words. The conversation is going on all day, every day. Nobody needs to be psychic to communicate with the Source of their being. That's secondary. It is as it should be. Q: If everyone has these subtler senses and ESP abilities, then why aren't we all hearing voices? Because it would be a distraction, that's why. You don't need to spend your time listening to voices. That can distract you and prevent you watching the real conversation that's going on, the real communication that is going on. Your teacher isn't tongue-tied. He isn't limited in his ability to communicate with you. He states himself very clearly every single day in your life. And if you watch just one day through from it's beginning to its end, just one day, watch what comes before you. Watch what people say to you. Watch what people do to you, and consider each one of those things statements from your teacher, then you will have gotten a Reading and you won't have to sit and wonder how attuned the psychic was who gave you the Reading. You'll see it revealed before you in form said clearly. This is what you are to do this day, and this is what you have set yourself up for. This is how you are acting. This is where your faults are. This is what you need to work on. These are your weaknesses; the times he got to you, they're the weaknesses. You need to close that gate. You need some strength here. You need to apply your energies there. All of those things are said. What a Reading you have available to you each day of your life by responding to what is said to you from the teacher. And that's as it should be because, in fact, Manly Palmer Hall describes the Akashic Record this way. He calls it, "the invisible Record of thought and action written upon the skein of time and space." Edgar Cayce described it this way. "The Record of the soul written on the skein of time and space." That "written upon the skein of time and space" is what we need to understand in order to understand how this Record is formed and how you can read it by looking at material objects, matter, around you. While you're sitting here, hopefully listening to me or whatever you're doing while we're sitting here, this room is alive with activity, far more activity than is obvious to you at the moment. Activities and interchange between you and the chair you're sitting on and the walls. The very walls of this room are alive as a whirling mass in space. Energy is vibrating in the very walls ofth is room. Every atom is in motion, whirling motion. Nothing here is solid. It's all alive with activity at this moment, while we're here. And while we're here in this moment, molecules are being born and dying, being changed and replaced. Cells in your body are dying and being replaced with new cells. There is an interesting thing that is happening in your body while cells are dying and being replaced with new cells, -you should be aware of this. What you are thinking at the moment a new cell is born, the condition of your thoughts, and the condition of your consciousness at the moment that a cell is born, is indelibly recorded in that cell. Your emotions, your attitude, your fear, if you are experiencing it - your
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hate, if you were experiencing that - your envy, if you were experiencing that. A Record of your thought and action, at that second, is indelibly recorded in the birth of the new cell- that happens while you're having an emotional experience. Now, that means that every time you have become angry, every time you have become hurt, jealous or any of the emotions, both good and bad, each and every time you had an emotional reaction it were recorded in the cells your body was building at that moment. Then every action, every thought of your life is recorded in your body. But what about when those cells die and are replaced with new ones? The interesting thing about the replacement of cells is that a new cell carries all that was in the old cell and adds to it what is happening in the moment. The very cells of your body contain an incredible amount of information. The very fact that scientists are discovering right now that man can be cloned is testimony to what I'm saying at the moment. One single cell in the body carries messages in it of what you are from the moment of birth up until now. And the cell that it replaced gave up its secrets so that the secrets of the former cell are contained in the present cell and they'll be carried over to the new cell, adding the experience of the next moment to it. You body itself is, in fact, an Akashic Record. But what about reincarnation? How does that get into the body? It seems that there is a little chain of protein that is programmed by Divine computer at the moment that you enter in this time; it carries all of the memories of the previous cells from way back so that you started this body with a Record. Built into that DNA chain, when you started, there was an Akashic Record, a little carry over. It's not limited to time and space. Brain surgeons have discovered a tiny little cell that is so microscopicthat it cannot even be seen bythe naked eye, it can contain a record of thousands of miles of space and of an infinite period of time. In a cell too small to be seen, all of that can be contained. Hardly limited. The cells of your body, then, contain your thoughts, your action and even back into times past. But just as important, perhaps, is that while you're sitting on the chair that you're sitting on right now, you are affecting that physical object. You are affecting it indelibly. You are permeating it with an electrical force. While you are listening or thinking, experiencing in this moment, your brain is producing electrical discharges. This room is alive with electricity. Electricity is tenacious of equilibrium, which means that if it is disturbed in any one portion of this room, it sends out undulations that fill the room. So every thought that you think right now is affecting the very atmosphere of this room by the change in electricity. Now at the same time you're doing that, the chair that you're sitting on is a whirling mass of atoms affected by the electricity in the atmosphere around it, and its crystalline forms are being formed in these inanimate objects. They are being impressed with the condition of the atmosphere at the moment that crystal was formed.
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Which means whatever you're thinking right now is being written into the history of the chair you're sitting on and the walls of this room. You're affecting the conditions of time and space by the creative action of your consciousness. The part of you that is creative enough to form a body and change it - and I should mention by the way, that that is the manner in which disease is created in your body. The thoughts that go on inside you impress their nature upon your cells. Certain cells contain incredible records of stress, which builds and builds and builds until it manifests itself. Your body contains a record of every time you've ever been angry. And it's interesting that when people know the right muscle to push or squeeze you'll experience a release ofthat emotion because it was built right into the flesh itself, right into the Record. So when your chiropractor buries his fingers up to the third knuckle, or it feels that way, he is releasing the little things that you built into that part of your body. He is reading the things that your body is saying to him; he is reading the Akashic Record. An intensity of emotion carries with it a great deal more energy than just thought. You are relaxed at the moment, but if there were an extremely emotional incident while we were here then a lot more energy would go into impressing that upon the walls or upon the chairs, upon the matter in this room. If we all got up and left this room en masse and someone came within 24 hours with an infra red camera and just photographed it, your image would still appear in the chair that you're sitting in now because you've affected the atmosphere, you've affected the chair. But it would appear as a very light form. However, if an extremely emotional incident had occurred, any one affected in that incident would stand out as a big blotch of red if, that area were photographed. And just as important perhaps, if a very sensitive person were to come into this room sometime later, moments or even years later, he would be affected by the emotion that was created here. He'd feel it. That probably, in fact, has happened to you. You've probably entered a room and without knowing why, you felt a foreboding feeling in that room, somehow you were affected so that you didn't want to be in that room. You were simply uncomfortable there and wanted to be somewhere else. You were reading from the Record ofthe room, it was having an affect upon you because ofthe energies created there. So far then, I have described this Record only as being a record of the thought and action created by individuals, and yet it goes further than that. It's more than just a concrete record of the moments of our lives. It has a record ofthe past, going back all the way to infinity and a record ofthe future as well. How could that be contained in this Record? If our thoughts are creating this Record and our actions are being impressed upon the matter around us, how can that Record in matter contain indications ofthe future?
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Well, Edgar Cayce gave a comment about a particular soul, a lady, who was told that in one incarnation, she was a nun and in another, she was a prostitute. And then he made a most peculiar remark. He said, "You made considerably more soul progress as a prostitute." Well I thought, "What a peculiar evaluation." I wondered, in fact, who made that judgment. Was that Edgar Cayce's consciousness making that value judgment? Is the Record itself simply an objective Record, recording the incidents as they happen, or is some Intelligence making a value judgment about that? Who was it, what consciousness was it, that told that woman that value judgment? I was concerned about that, so we did a Reading on it and asked. "Where did that value judgment come from?" And the Reading said, "The woman herself, the soul itself, made that value judgm ent in this way. Each night there is activity o fthe consciousness that lived the day. As you go through the incidents o fthe day, you are responding to karmic lessons, karmic opportunities. Each one o fthe lessons that you meet has a root or has a history. It has a source. There is a source oftha t lesson in your past. It didn't just come from nowhere. It came because you created the need fo r that lesson. As you met it today, you met something from the past, you acted upon it in the present and you created from it, a future." So the fact is that tonight, as you set consciousness aside, your soul will review the day. Now this is interesting in the light of the fact that dream researchers say that every night you'll review something from the past. You look at the incidents of that day. And they also say if you are deprived of the opportunity to do so you'll become too psychotic to handle the next day. The Source gives a very good comment on that. The Source says, that as you enter into a dream ofthe night to review the incidents that you meet each day, it's an experience reminiscent of the soul being called before the Judge on the Great White Throne. Each night of your life you evaluate the past and how you responded to it in the present. And on the basis of that value judgment of how you responded to it in the present, your own soul tonight will make a decision whether it must meet that lesson again, if it didn't respond to it well today. There will also come a time when you will remember the karmic root ofthe opportunities that met you today. Tonight in your dreams, you will review everything that happens today, all the karmic lessons. And in that review will be an indication of where the lesson came from. There will be an indication of how well you handled it and there will be an indication that it will or will not be restructured for you as a future event. You will predict your own future tonight. The Source also made this interesting statement., "Dreams are the act of a soul making an entry in the Akashic Record."
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So as you dream tonight, you will add something to the Record of the day. Already the Record of this day contains an objective record of what happened, what you thought and what you did. Tonight, you will add to it. You'll make a value judgment of what you thought and what you did. And you will ask for the opportunity to go through all that stuff again if you didn't handle it well, creating your own future by your dream tonight. When you find out these things, sleep becomes important. It becomes important to face sleep in the proper manner. Do you know that probably 95% of the people, probably 99% of the people of the world will sleep tonight by accident? They will not sleep on purpose; they will sleep because it is something that just happens to them, as if they were victims. It is important to enter sleep purposefully, preparing the consciousness and the body for it. You are embarking upon an experience that is so important; it is soul judgment, it is creating the future, it is an analysis ofthe self, an understanding of the self -that is how important it is. A third of your life is spent in these little reviews of what is going on. A third of your life is spent in that semi-conscious state of sleeping and reviewing dreams, reviewing the activity of the soul, looking at your purpose and deciding on your future. That is perhaps the reason that Cayce also once said, "Dreams are the best way for a soul to know about itself and its purposes." The best form of psychic activity for an individual, for most individuals, is in dreams. And the reason is because that is your closest contact with that same Akashic Record. The interesting thing about this Record is that it gives answers from many different levels. That is, if you ask a question of the Record from curiosity, you will receive fantasy in reply. But if you ask a question out of need, you will receive truth. Which is why we say to students in Inner Light Consciousness, when you go to bed tonight, you can ask a question. If you need to know the answer, the answer will be given to you. But there's a little statement that we give. It says, "I will bring to thy remembrance all things, whatsoever you have need of from the foundations ofthe world." And "need" is the only requirement. You must need to know the answer. The Record is simply unavailable to people who simply want to know about their past lives. One cannot read from the Akashic Record for that purpose. And when one blames a reader, when someone hangs out his shingle and says, "I am an Akashic Reader." And people go to him with all their curiosity, wanting to know about all of their past lives, one need not blame him so much if what you get in reply is fantasy. Unless you went with need and you asked questions purposefully, he didn't have access to truth. His access to truth for you and for your soul is through the door of your need. And he will be able to answer the questions that you actually have a need to know the answer to. It may even be unfortunate that parapsychologists in this time are trying to judge the accuracy of the channel through which the information comes. There's not much to be said for the accuracy or inaccuracy of the psychic if the accuracy is dependent upon the need of the questioner. We've a lot to learn in dealing with these Records, in dealing with this kind of opportunity.
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But I'm not suggesting that one find a psychic to review past lives. As a matter of fact, you have available at yourfingertips a Record of all that you've been in the past. It reveals itself through your attitudes of the present moment. It reveals itself through the opportunity of what's happening now. You can look at the opportunity that is put before you and know that activities of yourself in the past built that opportunity. You can read your past lives from the opportunities and abilities, incidents ofthe present. And they can best be read there, it is the most accurate statement that you can get of you in relation to the Record. And then one more thing, of course, as you begin to read your life in the present, as you begin to look at every incident and unfold it and know that it has purpose, know that it has a lesson for you, know that it was created by the teacher, two things that you should try to get from it. One, is an appropriate response to the lesson. And two, is an understanding ofthe nature, the personality, the consciousness, of the teacher that put it there. Get to know the Source of your being. And from an empty place within you, from a virgin consciousness, get to know that Source. There, is the being who can read from the Record. The seals are not sealed to him. I'm suggesting then that you come to know the Christ in you, the Source of your being. Become acquainted, and become acquainted like this. If you approach the Christ saying, "The Christ has been described to me by the Bible, or the Christ has been described to me by my minister. The nature of Christ has been described to me by Paul Solomon, or anyone else." If you approach saying, "I know what you are and who you are and what you're like, because I've been told," then you are not approaching that Source with a virgin consciousness. You are approaching with the adulteration of someone else's experience, someone else's description and someone else's ideal. Many masters have described the Christ. They have described God Consciousness, they have described ways of getting there, and yet, the descriptions of all of these masters do not necessarily jive. They seem not to agree. Why? Each one was describing through his eyes what his own experience was and his followers gathered round him and said, "This is the Christ we worship." And that's unfortunate. They were worshipping his Christ. "This is the Christ that we worship -and he's different from yours." Well, in both cases the people are worshipping an adulterated Christ, an adulterous lover. The Christ is always born of a virgin. Now that's important for you individually and personally to know. The Christ is always born of a virgin, which means something like this. One of ...(Name)...'s favorite statements is, "You have learned too much. You are too full of knowing. You have opinions on everything. You have beliefs about everything. Until you get rid of all of that, and don't know a thing, you can't begin to learn."
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The beginning of wisdom is the realization of how little I know. Emptying consciousness, sweeping it out and making it a virgin is the first step toward knowing Christ. Don't know anything. Give up your knowing. Don't know anything. But approach the Christ this day, or this night, with this kind of a conversation in your consciousness: I don't know who you are. I don't know what you are. I would not presume that I have any awareness of how you should appear to me. I only know my being has a source and there is something that has participated in my life. Now whatever you are, whoever you are, I want to know you better. There's your perfect prayer for coming to know the Source of your being. No more than that. Don't come to know a Catholic God, a Baptist God, a Jewish God, or any other labeled being. But if you come as a virgin, then the Christ is perfectly capable of revealing himself as He is. He will not go beyond your opinion. If you come with a preference, you'll get a preference, an adulterated Christ, not dependable. But if you come with no preferences as to what he should be, he will reveal himself to be more than you ever could have conceived. And you'll come to know a being greater than any master, any teacher. You'll come to know a Christ greater than any teacher ever could have described to you. His words can only describe his experience. They cannot describe the Christ. You'll know the Christ within your being, from a virgin consciousness. Now open to that, and know Him, not so that he will reveal the Record to you, but for no greater purpose than knowing Him, wanting to know the Source of your being. Then the revelation of what you have need of from your Record will be given, all the way back to the foundation of the earth and everything that you need to know in the present moment. There is a Record greater than the one written in your body. There is a Record greater than the one impressed upon this room, on the skein of time and space. All matter contains a record not only of what has happened to you since the beginning of time, but it also contains a Record ofthe thought and action of its Creator. Then the Great Akashic Record contains within it, a record ofthe thought and mind of God. There is an Akashic Record that is a soul record. There is an Akashic Record that is the earth record. And there is an Akashic Record that is the Great Akasha. The Great Akasha is tapping the mind of God, opening to God Consciousness. Akashic readers may read from any one of those levels, may read from your personal Akasha, and that's fine, useful. May read from a racial Akasha, a group Akasha, a national Akasha, the earth Akasha. But the one who is attuned to the Source of Sources reads from the Mind of God, the Great Akashic Record. Thank you.
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Dreams
The Journal As Your Akashic Record Inner Light Consciousness
Now what the Journal is, what it literally is, and the real reason that a student uses it probably gives it its greatest importance, because in using the Journal properly you stimulate another process that the Journal mimics. That means this. The Journal is bringing out of the ethers, bringing out of the Unmanifest, a map of the Unmanifest. It's impossible for you to keep a Journal concerning the activities of your life and their relationship without bringing out a map of where those came from...the formless from which the form came. What you are really doing is giving form to the things that we have been talking about when we say that you have an inner teacher that you should begin to communicate with. In the Journal, when we begin to communicate with that teacher, we bring it out of the Unmanifest into the manifest. We say that the teacher is interacting with us in daily life. When I keep a captain's log, and then from that captain's log I isolate the people, the chess pieces, from which my lessons are formed, then the relationship ofthose chess pieces to one another and what that suggests form the mystery lessons. Then I am bringing form out of the formless. I am giving myself a method of looking at something that psychics do when they go into the formless and try to bring it out. Now what happens in a psychic reading an Akashic reading? As nearly as we can tell something like this occurs: the Akasha is a combination of things. It is made up of images of events objectively recorded, but it is also made up of judgments about those events that are impressed upon them, so it contains not just the events but also the meaning of the event. A third thing that it contains is the intent behind the unfoldment of the event. So you could say it this way. The Akasha contains the intent in the mind of God. His purpose, His stated purpose in relation to the events recorded there. Then it contains the events recorded there and the relationship ofthose events to myself or to the world, depending on whose Akasha I'm reading and who the subject of the reading is. So it contains those things; however, it contains those things in a none sensory recording. So if I am going to get an Akashic reading I need to find an instrument with the ability to take that which is formless and give it a form to be relayed to me. So the job of an Akasha reader is to somehow become sensitive, through subtle senses, to what is written there because it is written in the sensory. Then he must be able to make a translation of that into a sensory mode, which means either he is going to draw illustrations, which are interpretations of what he sees, or he's going to give words to what he sees. In some way he is goingto bring it out ofthe formless and give it a bit of form which means that it has to go through him. Which is where it usually gets messed up.
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It requires a translator and it must be translated through the beliefs and the prejudices and experiences and personality and character and so on of the reader. Or I must learn to read it myself. Obviously that is superior. There are two ways I can learn to read it myself. And these two ways are not in conflict with one another. They are complimentary to one another and the most efficient form of taking information from the Akasha for myself is to use both ofthem. The two ways are these: One is using the facility of the mind that is identical to memory. It works like memory. Now how does memory work? I can use sounds or sights or any of the external senses to remember how those senses are not working. What I am experiencing is a subtler counterpart of those senses in memory. And I am remembering perhaps images, I am remembering perhaps feelings, sights, sounds, I am going to use one of those five senses in remembering. Now by the time a thought has come to my sense, I have given it a form. I have taken it out of the formless into the form. The memory has no form. It does not exist in a form manner. I give it form by my recall and then allow myselfto recall the feeling associated with it. For example iflca n remember a time when I stood on a mountaintop. How do I remember it? The way that I remember it may depend on whether I am a visual creature or whether my thinking is primarily sensory in the tactile sense. I may remember the visual image first, which more people will. Then if I think about it I may remember how that felt and the emotions associated with it, so I am giving it more and more form by bringing more senses into play. The Akasha is tapped in the same way. I try to remember events that I want to know about myself. Now, to try to give this more substance, let's say what the Akasha is used for. If I am going to get information from that record what kind of information will I seek? Maybe the best way to answer that is to consider the kinds of questions that are asked when people have Akashic readings. I believe that the most common question ofthem all is: what is my purpose? What am I here for? That's as good a question as I know. Now, there is one thing that I should tell you about that. Almost everybody believes that they entered this lifetime for a specific purpose. There was something in particular that they were supposed to accomplish in this lifetime as opposed to the whole series of their lifetimes. The Source differentiates between that and soul intent. They differentiate between what my intent is for this lifetime and what the intent is over a series of lifetimes. They differentiate by saying one is a lifetime intent and the other is the greater soul intent. They say that the soul intent is ever the same. For all people there is only one. The soul intent is to grow, to learn, to mature and become one with God. That's the soul intent. So it won't do you any good to come and ask your soul intent in a reading - because that's the information that you'll get. As to the manner in which you sought to do that in this lifetime, then the Source will answer more specifically. There is something else interesting about the way the readings come. The Source has never as faras Iknow ever justsaid: "You came to do this. Now get onw ithit!"
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Instead of saying this is what you came to do. They start analyzing tools that the person brought and show them how to figure out for themselves what they came to do. For example, the Source may say to a person: "It is obvious that you have musical ability. And it is obvious that with that musical ability you have creative ability, not just to perform but also to create music. Therefore, it should be obvious to you because you brought these tools that your lifetime purpose has something to do with creating music. Then they go back, usually, to investigate why the soul chose those tools in this lifetime. That's where the karmic background and former lifetimes usually come out. They will say that in a recent time you were greatly assisted by a musician. And in discovering the process which unfolded through his mind you admired that process and wanted your mind to be subtle and develop in that way and you wanted to give that gift to the world and so you created this desire, this heart intent, and it incubated these tools and that's what you came for thistime. That sort ofthing isw hatw ill unfold in a reading. Now I want to point out the components. It came from an experience, a desire, maybe even an appetite. Now that suggests some ofthe things that I set up as a lifetime intent may be a sidetrack. I may be going off on a tangent. The fact that it is a lifetime intent does not necessarily mean that it's the best thing for my soul development or unfoldment. The intent that directs my energy toward a particular pursuit in a lifetime subsequent to the one I'm living in may be as a result of appetite. For example, perhaps I was working on one track all along and moving steadily toward that. But then I see his talents and become fascinated with them and I get off on a tangent. And I have lost sight of the steady path that I was following before. That very often happens, so now it may be my subsequent lifetime intent to develop that talent; so it's a lifetime intent but it is a tangent from the soul intent. How can I know all of these things? You can follow the indication of the Akashic records by looking at your own life and the way it is unfolding. You should have an unfoldment of understanding about yourself and your talents in the Discoveries Section of your Journal. Talents and abilities are things that are points of interest, they direct our attention in certain directions. Usually there will be a point of decision whether I'll pursue that talent or whether I won't, and that is usually a minor initiation. When I leave an ability, talent, and go into something else, start to pursue an alternative, or when I give myself to the development of that talent in a major way, there is usually a turning point in my life right at that juncture. And because of that it may get recorded in my Discoveries Section. If it doesn't then what I would suggest to you is simply makean analysis of yourself: "What are the tools that I believe that I have to work with?" And when you make that kind of analysis there are a couple of suggestions that I would give you. When a person has had a talent for more than one lifetime,- if you have a talent now that you had in the past and it didn't begin with this lifetime,- then it is likely to be old hat with you, which means that you will not have as great an appreciation of it as if this were the first lifetime that you had it. And because of that you're likely to discount the importance of that talent. That is the reason why people who have a great ability that they themselves don't recognize but which everybody else looks at and says: "Look at that ability and they thinks it's nothing! Why aren't they developing it? Why aren't they pursuing
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it?" It's essentially because they have already pursued it. It no longer is particularly fascinating for them and they are now diverted into other people's abilities instead of going on with that. You should look for that in yourself. You should look for that kind of ability because one of the worse things that you can do is to ignore that kind of ability and lose it. Because you'll not return with it in a subsequent lifetime if it is not at least kept active. One of the best ways to find out whether you have a talent that you're taking for granted is to ask your friends. Ask, "If you were going to make a list of my talents what would you say my abilities are?' One ofthe things, one of the problems you'll run into is that unless friends are very, very expressive, erudite, unless they communicate very well they'll have a problem putting it into words. For example, I know some things that John does well. But to describe those things in words is difficult for me. I know that he has an aura of authority around him, which makes people listen to what he says quite automatically, even if he doesn't carry the title of manager. Frankly, that is a rare talent. Most people who even have the label manager have a problem getting people to give them authority and listen to what they have to say. John has a natural talent for taking charge and he doesn't even know it. That's the sort of thing you are looking for. How do you put your finger on that and how would John ever discover that? It's probably very difficult for him to recognize in himself, it has to come from somebody else. Most of you have that kind of talent that you probably don't suspect. That's one of the reasons that we like to get people to do readings for one another on the last day of an ILC experience. One of the problems with that is that people have not necessarily gotten to know one another well enough to notice and reveal those things in one another. They may have and they may not have, [gotten to know one another well enough] and because of that it may take some intuitive ability to bring it out, which is so much the better. But if you can clarify what it is that they're looking for in readings then the readings will become much more valuable. See if you can find out from five or six different people whether they will say the same thing about you. "What do you see as abilities in me? How would you describe the talents that I have? What do you see as the tools that I can best take advantage of in my growth and in expression of myself?" Get with some people before you leave here after this experience and sit down holding hands and touching feet. See if you can make it a meaningful, useful experience for you by discovering those talents. Then describe those, both those you get from someone else and those you can assess yourself. In this don't be afraid of being egotistical. There is another pitfall you'll run into. I may believe that I have some abilities but if I knew that anybody was going to read my Discoveries Section I wouldn't want them to see that I wrote that there. If you have some feelings like that it may be that what you're listing is wishful thinking. But I want to tell you something about talents. Do you know what a talent is? It is "attention directed toward a desire and given substance by practice." So a person might say, "I can't be a healer. I don't have the talent for being a healer." What is the talent for healing? A strong desire to heal backed up by repeated attempts. That makes a healer. Makes a musician,
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makes an artist, makes whatever. Now a talent very often gets tied up in karma. A talent that is carried from one lifetime to another is a karmic talent. But that's not the only kind of talent there is. There are talents that started in this lifetime because they developed the interest in this lifetime and acted upon it in this lifetime. I can develop a talent starting right now. Wishful thinking, what does it mean to record [in your journal] wishful thinking instead of a talent? Well, what you have recorded is the beginning of a talent. That's just as useful as recording talents. You've recorded what your abilities are and also what the abilities are that you would like to develop, and that's fine. Now that you have that assessment let's work with them. These tools are ones that I have and ones that I'd like to have. The next thing that I need to know is: How am I going to put those tools to work? When I have listed my talents I have a basic indication of my purpose in this lifetime. If you have listed talents then you have assessed your toolbox. This is the toolbox that I came in with. Now, given the tools in this box, what is the suggestion of my life purpose? Obviously, if I brought tools of an ability to express myself and an ability to explain things clearly, a desire to be with groups of people and a need to feel useful to those people, then I must have come in with the soul intent of teaching something to large groups of people. I can find that in my assessment of the tools. From that I have already gotten the fundamentals of an Akashic reading. The fundamentals are: I have assessed my tools. I have gotten an indication of my life purpose. Now I need to add to that. If it's true then that I came in with tools to be a teacher and I came in with tools that indicate that my teaching is probably to large groups of people and not just one to one. The next thing that I want to know is what it is that I intend to teach. Let's look a little further at the tools that you have. I know someone who has an exceptional talent for organizing in the home. For finding a place for things and putting them in the place and making the home look better as a result of it. This person also has an ability to explain why this goes here why that goes there to others. So there are people who can organize a home but can't explain why they did it that way. But when a person can organize a home and has an ability to explain why, that is a pretty good indication that they came in with a tool. Can you also understand the principles of putting that into place and teaching it? If so then it would appear that those are the things that you're going to teach. Things that you are interested in, the direction that your life is taking and the thing that you get most delight out of sharing with each other, sharing with other people, that is the subject of your tool box. Are you beginning to see how a reading can unfold? Can you do it for yourself? I think you can. If you examine that you can begin to see how your teacher, interacting with you in your life, can take the next step for you. The steps were assessing the toolbox and then trying to find out what specific area or department of life those tools relate to. So the tools and the building... what is it that I'm building with these tools? Here's another example: there are people with an ability to understand finance and financial relationships. People who have an ability in business and finance
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have a tendency to get cut off from the spiritual community because the spiritual community has been for years plagued by a disease called poverty consciousness. They have abandoned the dollar believing it to be evil. If you bring up the dollar in a spiritual meeting of most any kind, except in the orthodox churches, you are in trouble - because people don't want to talk about finance. They don't want to talk about the dollar and so any prophets given that particular expertise are mostly out there, in the world, and not connected with the spiritual world, and that is unfortunate. Anybody who entered here with a talent to deal with the dollar is also working on his spiritual growth. And the way he uses that talent is his spiritual growth. Those people who think he ought to drop working with the dollar and get involved in a spiritual movement don't understand what spirit is. Do you hear that? The spiritual school, the mystery school for businessmen is working in business, not sitting in an ILC class. Your teacher provides the lessons you need to learn in the forms in which you need to learn them. Now, it doesn't mean that businessmen shouldn't take ILC, but it does mean that when we think, "Oh, he ought to leave his business and come and teach ILC or share ILC," you may be wrong. It may be that the very best place for him to continue to learn is right there in the stockbroker's office, dealing with the challenges that come right there while using the Inner Light Consciousness principles. Don't assume that everybody needs to leave their business and come and take teacher training. It's an assumption that we'd like to make and I'm afraid lots of people who leave their business and come to Teacher Training are really dropping out on the lessons they ought to be applying their attention to. They are looking for an easier path. If you encourage that, have you done them a favor? OK, these points need to be considered. Come out of your Journal if you are operating it just as an exercise in keeping records, but not as an interface between you and your teacher. If you keep your Journal, keep constantly in mind that this is an interactive relationship. Watch for what that Journal is teaching you. Watch as if it were alive, as if it had a mind and could speak back to you. Then your Journal becomes a dialogue. Your input stimulates a response. OK, so you have your toolbox and you see what department or area that tool box is obviously directed toward. The next step is to watch how life responds to you when you begin to use those tools. Now, how does life respond to you when you begin to use those tools? If I say, "Okay I have creative music ability. I have an ability to perform, and so those are my specific talents, and now my inclination is towards spiritual growth and sharing that. I'm going to go and use my talents in creating music and performing it to see how much good that I can do and how many people that I can reach by doing so." So, what do I do? Let's see. What I do is, I cut a demo, right? And I circulate it around here and here and here. Now, what I said was, I have creative music ability, I have ability to perform, I have an inclination to touch people and affect people. I want to affect them spiritually. So, I cut a demo and I send it out to all of these places and it comes back. How many people have I affected? How much of what I set out to do, have I done? Well, I have expressed myself creatively, I did put some music together, I did perform but I didn't affect people by it.
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So, I say, "Okay, I'm being pushed back away from that. How about if I take this tack and use those abilities differently and if that is shutting me off from the people, then maybe the next thing that I need to do is to find where the people are and perform to them. Then I can see how many people I affect and whether I affect them well. So, I go and perform for as many groups of people as I can get a forum with and I perform music that turns them off. The response is not receptive; the response is not encouraging. Now, what do I do? I go back and look at my music and see what the response was. What the feeling was and what the basis of it was. What their need is and whether I can feed that by shaping this in a new way. So what I'm really saying is: I take my tools and I look at the area to see how life responds and then I respond to what life tells me. I reshape my approach by what life is saying in order to take it in another way. I try to put things to work, and I run into financial difficulty, perhaps, in getting that to work. Now, wherever I run into difficulty, life is trying to tell me something. The problem that most people have is that when they run into a difficulty, they assume that what life is telling them is that they shouldn't do it. Not necessarily, what is life really telling me? It may be telling me that that is not the way to finance it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be financed. You're doing something wrong when you run up against a block, but it doesn't mean stop. It means assess whether these are the tools that you have, - is this the direction that you need to take? How do you know that it is the direction that you need to take? You know by examining your ideal. Examining your ideal means, looking beyond the immediate expression of the moment. Now, this will help the musician. What do I eventually, over the period of an entire lifetime, wish to accomplish with my music. What is it that I really want to do? I can gather my ideal from there. Now, here is the mistake people make in setting ideals. Most people set their ideals on what they believe their ideals ought to be. Most people, when they record their ideals in their Journal, they record what somebody said their ideal ought to be, and it is not their ideal. Make sense? Okay, then how do I find out what my ideal really is? The best way is to look at the tools and talents, abilities that I have and what I am investing myself in. Especially look back to the investments that I have made up to the moment. And look at myself and say, "What are the areas of my life that I put greatest energy into? Well, I put lots of energy into my education. I put lots of energy into establishing a home and into having a family." The next thing I do is to ask the question "Why did I invest that much energy in education?" What was the eventual lifelong outcome that you wished from that? What was it that you wanted the education to accomplish? What was it that you wanted your marriage to accomplish? What was it that you wanted your family relationship to accomplish, over a lifelong span? The answer to that has to be your ideal at the time you were investing energy. What I have gathered from that is what my ideal has been up to now and the next thing that I do is to make a new assessment. Is that now what I consider of greatest value to invest my life in? Is that still my ideal? And if not what is my ideal now? When I ask, "What is my ideal now?" I still can run into the problem of stating what I think my ideal ought to be rather than what my ideal is. So, how do I avoid that? When I come up with what I think my ideal is I need to ask myself, "Does this mean that I'm willing to invest the
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energy necessary to reach that ideal?" That's the best question for finding out whether it's really your ideal or not. And that means you take everything in your life that has value to you and begin asking ... Is my ideal important enough to give this up? Wherever you get stuck, you have found an alternative ideal. So, you take everything that is of value in your life and you ask, "Am I willing to give this up to meet my ideal?" If not I have found what my real ideal is and it was not what I stated. That's the old story behind the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice. Remember that? And, that's why the Abraham and Isaac sacrifice is there. Q: If I could give up everything to accomplish that ideal and if that is clear in my mind, then that is my ideal? A: I would think so. I think that's really the definition of what an ideal is. So now, I have found my talents. I've found the area of life to which the talent is directed by finding my ideal. Also I find how life shapes the road toward that ideal and the life shaping the road toward that ideal should not change the ideal but should change the other areas in my life that will interfere with my going to that ideal. If I get distracted in my thinking I take a side-road. Life will push me back toward my ideal and I may swing to the other side and so on. It's a kind of zigzag road. Life will deal with the tangents along the way. It may be for example that in order to get directly toward that ideal I need to bring my concern for security in line. I really hold this as an ideal but for the moment I have financial problems to deal with. "So, I'd better start working for a while, right?" And a while longer, and a while longer, and what will eventually happen is one of two things. Either one day I will wake up and realize how far I am from my original ideal and I myself will turn my back on the way that I was going and start moving again towards the ideal, or all of the things that I have done in finance will suddenly fall through. I'll find myself penny-less and forced to deal with my ideals. Then I have to ask the question, "Do I want to start picking up the pieces and start working in that direction? Or do I want to re-assess what I want to invest my life in?" Do I drop what I have been doing and move toward my ideal? Life will call your attention to the problem. Life won' t force you to deal with it in a specific way. So even when there are financial collapses, life doesn't force you to turn from finance and deal with your ideal, it only calls your attention to the conflict. You can still go right ahead dealing with finance if you want. The difference in that is whether you pass or fail the initiation. Whether it turns you toward the ideal or whether it is just an unhappy experience and you go right ahead fighting it. Q. Is the assumption in this model that the ideal is spiritual? A. No. It may be finance. The best way to get the full picture of your life goal and its relationship with spiritual purpose or soul purpose, soul intent, is to watch the tool establish the ideal. Then see what life is saying to you about the accomplishment of that through the keeping of the Journal. Establish a dialogue with life so that the factors in the Akasha are speaking to you. Now, you can add something to the Journal by trying to remember where certain difficulties came from. For example, if I'm working toward the goal and I constantly have financial problems in getting toward that goal and other people working toward the same goal don't have financial problems in getting there, then, I
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know I need to have a memory of where this came from. Now, it may not be in this lifetime. I may have set up these difficulties and inclinations in a former time. If I did, how am I going to ferret that out? How am I going to understand how I built such difficulties? There are two ways. One is to simply look at the situation and ask if there is something in my memory about what produced this? Now, for me, that usually is what happens. I have memory of having gotten diverted by this kind of problem before and suddenly something clicks in my mind, and I say, "Oh, okay, that's where it is. Now I have to have a new response." Now if it isn't that easy for you, if the memory doesn't just pop into your mind, then you may have to use the Journal to assess the situations further. "In what kind of circumstance do I have financial problems and what kind of results do my finances produce?' For example, do my difficulties with finance cause problems with relationships? If so, my next question is, "How did I misuse relationships in relation to finance in a past time? Why are my relationships and my finance so closely tied together? Why do I, in trying to deal with my finances, tend to hurt people who are trying to help me financially?" Now, what you really do to try to remember, to try to reverse the situation, is to understand what is happening to those who are dealing with you now. And if you get close enough to what the question is, it will trigger the memory and you're tapping the Akasha. You're tapping memories inside you, and those memories and the Akasha are one and the same thing. It really is a matter of asking enough questions, often enough, to get right down to the point, to get close enough to it that the memory is triggered. Now, I don't think you can do this efficiently without the Journal. You're going to have to have the Journal as a map. You're going to have to see where your lessons are, you're going to have to see who is involved in them, you have to have the assessment of the self. The Journal gets the mysterious, evasive Akashic record out of the unseen and formless and brings it down on paper so that you can look at what the factors are that are working in your life. The Journal is the externalization of the Akashic record.
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Mystery School
Initiation into the Mysteries During our lifetime, there are a number of men who have travelled back in history by means of digging through the earth and there finding relics of a past time, and as they dig and find these relics, they write about them. And they pronounce very sage analyses of these buildings and sculptures, of these traces of pictograms and glyphs, and they describe for us nation after nation, civilization after civilization of people who had enormous tombs, and seemed to worship death. And wherever these great monuments turn up, they seem to be associated in some way with death and sometimes there are indications that someone was buried there. And so we get this image of savage people preoccupied with death and the seasons of spring and fall, and a very superstitious people who somehow repeatedly write about the numbers of seven and twelve and sometimes twenty-two. But according to those who find such tombs, it is all just stories of empty tombs and savage and superstitious people. There are some of us who look at these tombs and monuments and who hear the stories of blood and guts and gore, stories of virgins who somehow conceive and bear a child, and we notice that they crop up in countries as dissimilar as ancient China and Greece and South America and Egypt and Israel and Britain and Hawaii, and those who look back on history from an academic perspective, somehow guess that these cultures, these civilizations must have had some contact. Somehow, someone must have travelled from one to the other to have told these similar stories, else how could the same story be repeated so many times in so many different cultures. But the academics also tell us that ancient man travelled so little that it is impossible that Jesus could have been born in Israel, travelled to Egypt as a youth and returned as an adult. And so we are supposed to disbelieve that story of the flight into Egypt because it was unlikely that a man of his age would have travelled so much. Mind you this is told us by the same people who tell us that someone would have had to travel from India to Hawaii or they wouldn't have used the same word for ether. I just want to suggest to you that during our time together this week, you are going to look at Mysteries, and Mysteries are called Mysteries because they are Mysteries. We can find some constants among them, and from finding those constants, we can find our way somewhat, but we should be warned from the beginning that there is a particular way to listen to the Mysteries. We listen to the Mysteries as we listen to God, with the heart rather than with the head. And if we listen with the head, we shall become confused. And I wouldn't suggest that that is wrong. It is quite all right. If we listen with the heart, our head might not know exactly what we are being told, but a peculiarity of listening with the heart is that the heart recognizes truth. It may not be able to analyze it. It may not be able to explain it straight away, but it will respond to it. So I suggest that you listen with your heart. See what you can recognize and see if anything leaps within you from recognition. See if anything is awakened within you with recognition, if anything adds to your life, because that was the purpose of the Mysteries.
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We are going to find some ancient, strange, strange stories, stories too strange to make much sense if they were applied to every day life and left brain thinking, and get used to talking about left brain thinking and right brain, because we will be shifting back and forth time and again through the week. And when I speak of left-brain, primarily I am going to be speaking of an analytical, rationing, reasoning mind. And when I speak of the right brain, I am going to be speaking more of an imaginative, fertile, intuitive mind. Now that division is rather arbitrary, I know, and I won't argue it scientifically because that isn't my interest, but I will simply suggest that there are the two ways of thinking and that we will use them both and sometimes we will move back and forth from one to the other, and the transition might be a little difficult, but if you listen with your heart, you will get right through it. There are stories in Greece, in ancient Egypt, in China and in South America which tell of a young child taken away from the parents at a very early age, sometimes suggesting as early as age 3 or 4, sometimes later, more on toward age 12, but the children were always special children and the places that they were taken were special places. These schools where they were taken were called mystery schools or Schools of the Mysteries, and in many of these schools the youngsters were training in things we know, reading, writing, arithmetic, and then they were told some interesting stories. The stories in each particular case were called The Mysteries, and the stories consisted of legends, myths, dramas, and they mixed together equally stories of gods and stories of men. They are similar in each instance in some particulars that we will get used to, and as they were told these stories of the Mysteries, they were watched to see how they would respond to various parts of the Mysteries and to those who gave a signal of recognition, they were taken further. But it wasn't just a matter of telling stories, it was also a matter of developing rhythms, chants, the use of exercises, physical, mental and spiritual exercises, sometimes a control of diet, and with this mixture of very rigorous training, these youngsters were taught to move freely in the sensory world around them and to be masters of at least one thing in this sensory world. Now when I say masters of one thing, I speak now of crafts, arts or sciences. Some of those things that we are more familiar with they were taught to master, and as they mastered one of these crafts, arts or sciences, they were taken further to the mastery of a subtler world and subtler energies. Just to give you a bit of a glimpse of the subtler world and the subtler energies, let's assume that we are living in some ancient culture in which we live offthe land, perhaps in the woods. We are surrounded bythe energies of the night and nature, and we make our way through survival by day and in the evening gather together and eat. Now all of this is normal. Perhaps we are living in a culture that doesn't yet know the relationship between fathers and children. That is, a culture in which the science has not suggested yet that men have anything to do with the birth of children, so the women have a close relationship with the children. The men are defenders of the tribe and have a bit more freedom to go about here or there as they wish, where the women are closer to the tribe, and as we gather about in the evening, there is a need for communication and the communication turns into stories, dances. The stories and dances become familiar, but for the storyteller to have any effect on us, he learns soon that he must be a good storyteller, and a good storyteller is entertaining.
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And the idea of entertainment is the first idea that we want to look at in the sense of the Mysteries, because by being entertaining these storytellers already have taken on an ability to manipulate subtler energies. Now that means this. The story teller/entertainers would have the effect of turning something on or turning something off in their listeners. What they turned on and off sometimes had to do with love or fear. Sometimes it had to do with loyalty. Sometimes it had to do with the identification ofthe immediate family as opposed to another tribe. Sometimes it had to do with war. Sometimes it had to do with survival. But in any case, the storyteller's opportunity and indeed challenge, was to take responsibility for something in the tribe that he couldn't see, something in the tribe that even to this day defies description. It has something to do with enthusiasm. It has something to do with the heart. More than anything else, it has to do with life. Now as we associate this with life, we have mentioned entertainment. We have mentioned loyalty. We have mentioned survival and we have mentioned tribal warfare. We have mentioned family and we have mentioned love and fear. Now with all of these concepts together, let us take a look for a minute at what a storyteller does, for it becomes the storyteller's job to increase some kind of energy amongst the group. And if he does it well, he will bring this energy to a crescendo at will and he will diminish it at times at will. He will increase their sense of love and loyalty, or he may increase their sense of fear and guilt, but in either case, he is working with subtler energies that cannot be weighed or measured. And what he is arbitrating, what he is manipulating, what he is amplifying and modulating is more than anything else, life force, vitality, the aliveness in us. And as the storytellers grew more effective they learned how to make a people more alive, alive and in harmony with themselves and with their family, alive enough to win a w a ro r to overcome an epidemic. The storytellers became more than storytellers as the people ofthe tribe got used to associating this ability of entertainment and of modulation of life force with a single person. That person often became the elder of the tribe and became respected. They came to be, in fact, the person to whom the sick were brought, and in fact, they were the person to whom the person ofthe tribe or group came in times of trouble. Sometimes the storyteller was a woman. Sometimes it was a man. Whichever it was, this person became a respected elder of the tribe, a judge, the historian of the tribe, a healer, sometimes became king or leader of the clan or tribe, but not often. Not often for a particular reason and this is a reason that will become important to us as we go through the week. There were two kinds of energies that were used in this ancient time. One was the power of a king, and the other was the power of the prophet. The power of the prophet was very different from the power of the king and if we can get used to the difference between the two, we will get used to one of the factors that is at work in the ancient Mystery Schools. The difference between these two is the difference between the sword and the wand. The king, on the one hand, wielded the power of might, of strength and of the sword. The prophet, on the other hand, wielded the power of the wand or the air, of the subtler forces, and the prophet could often make or break a king, could decide who would be the king. So his power was very often greater. The prophet or prophetess, priest or priestess, was the person responsible for modulating life force, and the one who modulates life force should be able to increase it in an individual, causing a healing effect to amplify it or to decrease or depress it. Also, for particular effect, for particular purpose, and on purpose.
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This is the power ofthe magi, the magician, the priest, sorceress, sorcerer, occultist. They have been with us in every generation throughout time, and their power remains as strong today as in an ancient time. But we don't often see those temples, pyramids or monuments that have been declared to be tombs of a dying god. We still hear the stories. We hear the stories of the body of the child of God who was born of a virgin, and the story is gory here, pardon me for this, but I am only repeating it, cut into 12 pieces, scattered around a countryside. And usually the heart is preserved or escapes in some way, and is brought to the body and the body is brought back together. It is resurrected to new life, and those twelve pieces ofthe body become now described as servants. The servants are brought together in one body. And then we encounter the mother of this child, remember she was a virgin mother. But as they are brought to the mother, they are dissimilar, they are scattered, they are no longer functionable because the body has been dismembered, but when they are brought to the mother, a key phrase is spoken and they come back to life. And that key phrase, the mother says to the pieces, to the servants, "Whatever he tells you to do, do it." And as the servants come together as one, so the body is resurrected and there is a marriage performed and through the sacred marriage, a child again is born. This strange story was told in places like Elyseus in Greece, in the Dionysian and Bacchic Mysteries. It was told in China and it was told in South America. And wherever it was told, it had the same meaning and the same effect. And it is one that I want to share with you now because this is the beginning of our exploration through the Mysteries. And then we will work together to take pieces of it apart, piece by piece, and see if we can make it come to life again. What I want to tell you right now is that I know, I know who is the Master in the silent place in the hidden house. I know who he is and I can recognize him. And I know about the initiator who lead the young aspirant through the trials by fire, by water, by earth and by air, who lead people, individuals through encountering love, falling in love and having the heart absolutely broken by separation. I know about the initiator who has taken the young aspirant through every hurt, through every heartache, every line and every trial that can be imposed upon mankind. I know about the sarcophagus in the tomb which when struck as if striking a gong, will sound a sound that will echo through the initiator's initiatory chamber, and as that sound rings and bounces off the wall, the soul of the aspirant takes flight on the wings of Horus and flies out into the stars to explore the greater world and returns more alive than ever. I know about that role, about the initiator. I know about the Master and can recognize Him. What I want you to know right now, is that as I look into your faces, I see faces of individuals who have gone through the trials of life. You have faced enough hurt to last any individual, any initiate for a lifetime and many lifetimes. You have been challenged over and over with every challenge that challenges the character of men and women. You have been tempted with most every temptation that can be known to man and woman. You have been faced with fears. You have been through all of the things that I could possibly describe that the ancient initiatory aspirants were put through to become initiates. And through it all, you have come here tonight, you have come together because something in you knows, something in you knows that final answer to that final question that was put to the initiate, that final question being a request to know the unspeakable name of God, which when known, just by the very
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knowing enlivens the body in such a way that it becomes a new initiatory chamber, a new pyramid, and through its chambers of initiation may pass multitudes of new initiates in this day and in this time. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear. I look upon you, I look upon your face, and I see what has been called a tomb. And I recognize that there is stretched before two pillars within you a veil which hides the holy place. And I know that the veil that is stretched before you, between you and me, is something that you have erected because you believe that you have been required to do so. It is a veil that has to do with expectations. It is a veil that is composed of the way you act and the things that you say, and it is meant to hide something that is very, very precious inside you, because you have a treasure. You have a treasure of the utmost important value that you do not want to be exposed before vile people. You have a treasure that is hidden within the Holy of Holies within you, stretched between those two pillars that have been referred to in the Mysteries as two thieves. They are called two thieves because those two sides of yourself intend to steal your birthright. They are two thieves and both of them have whispered in your ear over and over again in this test of initiation, they have whispered into your ear again and again, "I am the real you." And the thief on the other side has whispered, "No, I am the real you." And I can tell you a little bit about those two thieves. One of those thieves is like a little innocent child who is clambering to know the world, wants to see everything, everything. Wants to do everything. This little child within you, this innocent babe in you has never heard of anything that he didn't want. Never seen anything, never become conscious of anything he didn't want to do. He wants everything, wants to do everything, wants to be everything and believes that he can. He is mischievous, playful. She is very much alive. That is until the other thief, the other thief in you is responsible for making sure this little child behaves itself. And this other side of yourself is always scolding, always nagging, punishing, teaching, maybe belittling, making the child behave, encompassing the child in respectability. And this respectable parent/adult part of you and this innocent child in you create two pillars of your being between which is stretched a veil and that veil is a veil that I call "your act." And if you have your act together then you know what people see when they look at yourveil. They see an image that you intend for them to see. That image says, "I am proper. I am mature. I am adult. I am responsible. I am all of the things that I am supposed to be." And behind that veil is a person who peeps out once in a while. Behind that veil is another individual, and I know something about that one too. That one, who lives behind the veil, hidden, has an infinite capacity to love, and wants to love and wants to be loved. And is so full of love and so determined to love and to be loved, that you have been taught by those who hide the mysteries that this precious part of you, that is the most alive part of you, that is the living part of you, this precious part of you is vulnerable and must be protected behind the veil and must be hidden. Don't let anyone see who it is because they will take advantage of it. If you love too much you will be hurt. If you allow yourselfto be loved too much, you will be too vulnerable. Hide behind the veil. I just want to warn you about this week. It is a little dangerous to be here if you want to stay hidden behind the veil because it is my intention to rip it aside and reveal to you who you are. I want to rip aside the veil of the temple and let you see what those ancient aspirants who applied for entry into the schools of the mysteries wanted more than anything else to know. They wanted to know enough that they exposed themselves to trials by fire, by water, by air and by earth, trials that in their descriptions will horrify you. And yet those trials were designed to be a staged replica ofthe very same things that you and I as we live this life are going to be faced with, the challenges that are challenges to our character. And the thing that perhaps
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you haven't been told is that enrolment in this Mystery School is automatic. You are automatically enrolled and the initiatory tests are provided. The only real option is this. You can go through it consciously and intentionally or purposefully, or you can go through it accidentally, kicking and screaming all ofthe way. In order to go through it unconsciously, you only have to pretend to be asleep or dead, unconscious, and that is all right. But I just want to tell you something about the end part of the initiation in the great sarcophagus. The initiation ended when the aspirant was very rudely shot into his body and awakened from his celestial journey by the hierophant striking the sarcophagus a blow that sent a reverberation throughout the hall, and that great gong sounded to wake up the initiatory aspirant again at the end of three days and three nights in that cold tomb. I want you to know I'm here to wake you up, to finish this initiatory process and to let you become aware of the remaining part of the lessons and the opportunities in this mystery school. I want to wake you up, draw aside the veil, and reveal to yourself who you really are. I want to let you know that you are the one that the story was written about. You are the one that the story was written for. And it was for no one but you. Take it personally. Take it as literally as you dare, and know that whatever was available to any one of those great ones who became the initiates of the ages, who awakened man to his opportunity through the many religions, through the many nations, through what sounds like paradoxes in the many different mysteries, whatever opportunity was available to them to come to know, those opportunities are available as well for you, and what it is that you are to do is not to wish, not to wish that you were alive back then so that you could have applied for initiation, not to wish that you had a greater power or opportunity today, or that your life were different so that you could make application and become one of the wise and illumined ones. Don't wish that things were different for you. That is the first secret. Don't wish to be anywhere other than where you are right now with the opportunities that are available to you because the curriculum for you was personally, individually designed, specifically designed for you by a Master teacher who knew exactly what you need to encounter right now in this time to build your character as the character of one of the illumined ones, to awaken your mind as the consciousness of one ofthe illumined ones. Everything that is needed for your awakening is provided and is before you. If you are willing to wish for what you have instead of trying to have what you wish for, then you are one of those on the threshold of awakening to responsibility for life, to being alive, and you are one of those about whom it is written, that you have gathered together again the twelve parts of your body, have made of them servants to the Christ in you, and through that have participated in the resurrection. Speak, speak to the two thieves. Don't condemn them. Don't try to get rid of them. Don't try to get rid of those voices. You didn't know that I knew that you had voices in your head, did you? I know you do. I know that you think, and the process of your thinking is like a little conversation going on inside your head, and in that conversation, you are either encouraged to do things or you are discouraged. Your sense of self, your sense of worth is either built up or it is depressed by that conversation going on inside your consciousness, inside your head, the place of the skull. Do you know that the place of the skull is called Golgotha, which is where the cross stood, where the Christ was crucified between the two thieves? But underneath the skull is a cave, a cave in which when you discover that what you really are, the life in you, the beauty in you, when you discover that that is crucified on this veil, this veil of the you that you are pretending to be. Or let me say it in a better way, the veil from your side looks different from the veil as I look at it. When I look at you, the tomb that I see is not the same tomb that you see from inside. The tomb that you see from inside is called the you that you are afraid you are. Think about it. The you that you are
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afraid you are is a you that you really don't want to be, but you are scared to death you might be like that; you're afraid that someone will tell you that that is what you are. From your side, it is the you that you are afraid you are. What I want to tell you is: that is not who you are, and that is not what you are, and neither the veil from the way I see it, nor the veil that you see, from behind, neither of those is who you are. But who you are is identified in the way that He identified Himself to one of the great initiates of all time, who described his initiatory experience this way. He said he climbed to the top of a mountain. He was looking for some stray sheep, and in the stories ofthe initiates, sheep are very often used to refer to stray thoughts, that we, as shepherds, are responsible for leading into greener pastures. But when those thoughts go astray and we go off following them, sometimes it is the best thing that could have happened because those sheep once in a while, when they go astray, climb to the very top of the mountain, over rocks and cliffs that you might not have gotten to in any other way than when you follow that stray thought to the top of the mountain, and there you encounter a cloud which obscures the peak. When you go as far as you can go, when you can't go any further there is a key phrase to use. The key phrase is very simple. You could learn it in a moment. All you have to cry out is, "Help me." That's all. Just "help me". Now there is one little problem. If you have been brought up to believe that there is nobody up there to help you, the little problem is that you won't cry out for help. Or another little problem is that that being that is there to help you may have been described to you so well that you have him in a little box, and he's not allowed to help anyone like you. If you are in either one of those categories, you don't believe in Him and therefore you can't call on Him. Or you do believe in Him and you believe that you are unworthy. If you are in one of those boxes, you might not get any further than the top of the mountain. But if you destroy the box. If you forget about what you have been taught and told and what you believe and disbelieve, and if instead you simply cry out into the unknown and the unknowable, "help me" then you will be caught away from the top of the mountain, through the cloud, into a place of light. And when you encounter the fire burning in the tree there, ask the Name. When Moses asked for the Name, he was not given any ofthe Hebrew or Egyptian words that are used to denote God. The response was not Elohim or Adonai or Ptah or Osiris or Ra. It wasn't any ofth e Hebrew or Egyptian or Chaldean or Greek Names for God. But rather he was told, "If you will call the Name of God, you will have to say I AM, you will have to use the verb which means life, actively. You will have to repeat that verb, and the name simply is repeating the verb which denotes the action of being alive, repeating that twice. I AM, I AM, or you can call that I AM THAT I AM, or I AM WHO I AM. I am Life, I am that which lives. I am that which feeds life and which makes life more abundant. That is who I am. The life in you is that which is alive in you, it is the source of your vitality, it is who you really are. Not your identity. Not your name. Not any of those things that you would call self. Your ability to love and to be loved is behind that veil ready to be awakened through initiation. Get to know that part of yourself. There is one little thing that I want you to know about those who apply for the Mysteries and how they were chosen in an ancient time. They were chosen something like this. There are children all over the world who can be taught to read and write, and there are some who don't learn that very well. There are children all over the world who can be taught to imagine wonderful things and there are many, many children who can be taught to stifle their imagination. There are those who can be taught that God does not exist, those who can be taught to really believe you can't talk with bunny rabbits or trees, those who can be taught to behave themselves, to be ordinary, to really disbelieve what
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they are not supposed to believe and believe what they are supposed to believe, those children whose thinking could be manipulated, those were not the children who were accepted into the schools of the mysteries. There were some children who, no matter how well they were taught simply could not force themselves, even when they tried they could not force themselves to not believe. Those who can't not believe the magic, those who regardless of how effectively they are taught, cannot not believe in God. Those who can't not believe in healing. Those who can't not believe in magic. Those who cannot not believe, those arethe ones who whether others like it or not, and whether they themselves intend to or not, they will keep tempting the spirits of God. They will keep poking around the corners of life and through the veils; they will keep seeking until that which they know and cannot not know is confirmed to them. And when the confirmation comes, that is awakening, that is initiation ofthe first degree. And from then, it becomes a deliberate conscious choice to serve as a priest or a priestess ofthe Mysteries. And that is how it happens. If you happen to be one of those people who can't not believe, even though you have tried to not believe, even though you have tried to make your mind behave itself and act in a mature, concerned, responsible adult way like you are supposed to, for those of you who can't not believe, this is an invitation to explore behind the veil to see what is in the School ofthe Mysteries. I would like to take you on a journey with me now, if you will. If you can remember some of the sketches, the inscriptions of Horus, Horus, you may remember is a bird and is shown in the Egyptian glyphs, [wings] folded, in front of him, like a hawk. He is associated with Hermes or also with Mercury. He is associated with the thought that goes straight up and comes straight down again. Just so that you can know this particular bird, this particular being a little bit better, I want to describe a little scene for you in which this particular one is referred to. And as he is a hawk in the Egyptian Mysteries, so he is the eagle in Native American Mysteries, and he is a dove in the Hebrew Mysteries. And as a dove, he is described like this. In the Gospel ofJohn, the beginning chapter ofthat book which was a mystery school initiatorytext, there is told a story, and the story should be read as if you were reading an entry from your dream journal from the night before. If you have a dream in which a man appears, you should never think that that man is someone else that you dreamed about, but rather should think, there is a man in man of the nature of this one that I dreamed about. So I want to know something of the nature of the man who appeared in my dream. What can I know about him? What I can know about him is that he is a man sent from God. His name is John. That may help me a little bit because John and Jonah are the same word, and the word Jonah means dove, and the word Jonah or dove means prophet. So there is a man who appears in my dream, and somehow in my dream I know that he was sent by God and I know his name is John and he is going to tell me something about his relationship with God, about my relationship with God, because he is a prophet. So I do what I always do when someone appears, especially when something comes up within me and tells me about God. The parts of myself, the voices that I referred to earlier within myself start to question him. So in my dream, I dream that I am asking him, "Who are you? Where did you come from? Where did you get this authorityfor telling me about God?"
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And this man in the dream says "I am someone who can tell you what I have seen and what I have heard, just what I am a witness to." That sounds suspiciously like I am dreaming about my senses. All this teacher can tell is what he has seen and heard, what he has been the witness to. But then he says, "There is another teacher coming after me who is preferable to me because he existed before I did." Here is a man in my dream that I know is sent from God who says that he can tell me about things that I see and I hear, just the things that I am witness to, but there is another teacher coming who is preferable. And I keep insisting, in fact there are parts of me that question him. There is the religious part, which is described in this story as the Scribes and the Pharisees, and they question him saying, "By what authority are you telling me this? Are you some kind of prophet? Are you Christ?" "No, I am not any of those things. I am just ordinary. I can tell you only the things I see and hear." And I keep questioning, "Are you a teacher? Are you..." And finally he says, "I'm just a voice coming out of all of your confusion, and I am saying if you will put your priorities in order, if you will know just what is most important to you, if the most important thing to you is to know God, then another teacher will come." And then he says, "Here is how you will know him when he comes. Everything that I tell you comes out of the thing that I told you before. I am the voice of your mind, your senses. And your thoughts are just like sheep and each one follows the one before it, and when you think something, your next thought will go on to develop it further, and that is the way rational, logical, linear thin king occurs." And he says, "When thoughts come from me, that is how they will come. They will develop out of what you have seen and heard, and they will follow after one another like sheep after a shepherd." But he says "Here is how you will know that ultimate teacher when he appears. You will know because it is like this. When a thought comes from Him, it will be as if a dove descended out of heaven and rested on your shoulder. And it will cause you to feel that you are the beloved child of God and He is pleased with you." Now here is what I want to tell you about this. When your thoughts are running after one another and one thought is developed out of the previous thought, then your mind is working and figuring things out in a rational, logical, sensory kind of way. When your thoughts are the result of things that you have seen and heard, when the senses are the stimulus, then they are the thoughts of this linear plane. But when things become too much for you or when you become so quiet that your thoughts are not running around in circles, then when a thought descends just lightly upon you, not coming out of a previous thought, not coming out of a sensory experience, but it just alights on you and causes you to feel blessed, causes you to feel a relationship with Source, then that is the teacher to follow. And this teacher that descends with a thought out of heaven and rests on you, this is the dove, this is the hawk that flies beyond where your senses can go and where your mind leads you. Lets get in touch with this part of your consciousness that can fly away from your body, away from your mind, away from your sensory sphere, this part that can soar into the heavens and then come back to rest upon you, this part that is called the messenger ofthe gods, let's get in touch with it.
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What I would like you to begin to imagine is that you have just been through the challenges of an initiatory temple. Now what this means is everything that you have ever been afraid of, the things that scare you most in the world, the things that have the greatest potential to scare you, these things have just been brought in front of you, you have just encountered them, and the challenge that is given to you by your initiator is this: If you can face all of these things absolutely unafraid, if fear doesn't motivate you, if there is no fear, but you boldly reach out to touch the face of these things which have had power over you, then you will be given power to transmute them, to change them into servants instead of into demons. All ofthe demons that you have been afraid of, now try to imagine for a moment, all ofthe things that have scared you in your life, that you have given power over you by being afraid of them, imagine being approached by them and told," What you must do to overcome this demon, to change its nature into a servant, is to reach out with a gentle touch. Be willing to touch it without fear." You have just gone through all of these challenges and let's say that you have encountered all of these fears, the things that have been fears, and you have faced them without fear and you have come through the initiatory challenges, and now you have come to the last one. In this last one, I would like you to imagine that you are lead to a great stone sarcophagus, a great casket, a tomb of stone, large enough to contain your body, and you are told to step over the stone wall into it and lie down. Now you have just been through everything that can scare you, and you faced and reached out to touch each one of these things, height and depth and aloneness, loss of all material possessions, loss of family, loss of friends, loss of reputation. You have just been through everything that can happen, every terrible thing that could scare you, you have just been through it and you have accepted it. And now you face this stone tomb. You step over the wall and you are told to lie down. As you lie down on the cold slab of stone, you hear a little music coming into the room. And as the music begins, and as you start to recognize it, a slab of stone is slid over the sarcophagus in which you lay. And just as this stone is about to cut off your source of light and air, you recognize the tune. It is a funeral march. And as you lie in that cold darkness with the stone over you, with sounds of funeral music, you are left completely alone, and you think this must be the real thing, this must be death. I am cut off from air. I am cut off from light. I have just been sealed in a stone tomb. This is the end. Just then you begin to feel as if there are two marks being etched in your body. One comes from one side, down the center of your face, down the center of your being, and the other from the other side, down your face and down the front of your body. Try to feel this division, this line being etched, on the one side is a great wing and on the other side is a great wing, and just above where the two wings come together is a hard point of a beak and the head of a bird. Now try to feel that, feel your shoulders as great wings that fold in front of you. Feel your head and your face as the face of a hawk with a beak coming down to the point where the wings meet, and as you are trying to imagine that, close your eyes and image yourself, experience yourself lying down on a cold stone in a tomb. The light has been closed off, and yet you feel inside the tomb a great light lighting up, and you feel the wings that compose the sides of your body beginning to unfold. Feel as if you are covered with feathers, the feathers of a great bird, and on yourfeet are talons, and as your wings begin to spread, you realize that they spread beyond the limits ofthe sarcophagus and you are caught up into a path of light that leads away from the stone tomb, beyond the pyramid, beyond the deserts, out into the sky and straight toward a star. You can see Polaris far in the night sky and feel yourself moving faster than time, faster than light toward that star. Speed away from the tomb and from your body. Go. And as you are going, don't just imagine it. Be there. Feel your feathers being ruffled in the wind. The wind just
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passing over the edge of the blades of your wings, and feel yourself flapping those wings again to gain height and to gain speed, moving like a bullet through this path of light. Go toward that star. Pass beyond the sphere of earth, pass out ofthe realm of space and time. Go farther and higher than your consciousness has ever gone before. Go. And as you go flying straight into the brilliant light that is the star, go through it, and through the realms of time to return to earth again, but as you come down toward this planet I would like you to come down into a different time, a different time than the one in which you left. Going back into history to wherever you prefer to go, find yourself coming down to earth, and as you near earth, look down at the body that you occupy, and look first at your feet and see what the feet are wearing, whether they are boots or sandals or barefoot, whether they are the dainty slippers of a lady or the shoes of a man. Notice what the feet are like, and then come right up the body to experience the body that you are slipping into in a different place and time, and see what you are wearing. As you notice what you are wearing, what color, what kind of clothing, notice your face and your body. How do you feel? Look around you to see where you are. What city is this? What place, what period of time, what do the other people look like, where are you? What is this place called? And why are you here? What were the challenges in this life? What is your purpose for being alive? What were the lessons learned? Take that body that you find yourself in this ancient time, take it into the nearest temple. What kind of temple do you see? What country? What place? What does it look like? What is it made of? Go inside the temple to the initiator and ask the initiator to return you to where you belong to, and let yourself leave that body, flying away again on the wings of Horus to the star. Go as high as you can go, beyond space, beyond time, straight into the light ofthe star and return down again to the initiatory temple to the body in which you now sit, and fold your wings and experience lying down again in the sarcophagus to complete your initiation and to have the stone rolled away from the face of the tomb to draw in your breath and begin to be aware again of your body and the room in which you sit. Make yourself more alive than before. Breathe in life and light, and accept this body that is your temple of initiation with the awareness that if you are going through lessons in a temple of initiation, no matter how well constructed the lesson, no matter how fearful, you know that it is a theater, that this lesson is structured before you for the purpose of your learning it, and you know that it is no real threat, and because you know that, you are not afraid. And you are willing to enter each challenge knowing that it is especially prepared for you, it is yours, you welcome it as a step in initiation and make it yours. Know that the challenges are created for you lovingly by your teacher who wants you to pass each degree of initiation and take on the power to do so. Now let yourself move and stretch and yawn. Open your eyes and breathe deeply. Get some air and be here now. And think about just this one thing. If you knew that the challenge that is before you in any given moment was structured by a teacher who put it together as an excellent piece of theatre, you wouldn't be afraid, would you? You would know it's theater, structured just for you by your teacher because it is the challenge that you asked for to pass your initiation. If you are willing to be conscious, if you are willing to be consciously, deliberately enrolled in the school that you are in, then you face just such a set of lessons in this life, with just such a friend and guide and teacher and with the same opportunity to not be afraid. I don't suggest that reality is unreal. I don't suggest that the things that are going on in your life and are challenges right now are just a piece of theater, any more than any of life is just theater. What I am
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suggesting to you is this. You can't be killed nor can you die. You can finish with one set of challenges and start another. Like the scenes and acts in a play, you can change costumes, you can change roles, and you can play the role as effectively as you want with all of the emotion that you want to put in it. And let me assure you that if you don't play that role with all of the effectiveness that is available to you, it will not be a good act. It will not be a good play, and you won't entertain the audience. So let's make it real. Get really involved, and when you are really caught up in it all and notice that people are watching you, then notice this. Any time an actor is on the stage in the middle of a part and he suddenly notices that the audience is there, watching him, what happens is he gets out of character, and he will mess up the part because he is self conscious, because he is doing it for an audience. And in that moment, he becomes the real him, suddenly naked without the role that he is playing. He has to jump quickly back into the part to be convincing, or he has to drop the whole facade and make a real contact with his audience and interact with them. Now, where you are right now [there] is an opportunity to be consistent with the character if you want to be, or what you can do is draw aside the curtain and be who you really are. And all that requires is that you admit what you are doing while you are doing it, and be responsible for doing it on purpose. Now that may sound ridiculously simple, but I want to say it as simply as it is and let you see if you can work with it. Simply take responsibility for being who you are and what you are doing right now, or at any other given moment. Admit that you are doing it because you choose to do it, because you want to produce the effect that it is producing. So what you have to do to give up the role is give up any pretence that the way that you feel in this moment is caused by somebody else or some conditions of life. Give up all of the reasons except just this one. I am here because I want to be, doing what I am doing, being who I am. I am solely responsible forthat and I take responsibility for the fact that I am doing it, not the fact that it is being done to me. What I am describing is becoming deliberately conscious. If you are willing to do that, then you can still play the same role but play it on purpose. Drop the act. Be conscious and alive, and you get to participate. Now, we are describing really two things as we work this week with mystery schools. One of them has to do with building character. That was one of the responsibilities of the mystery school. Building character, building the ability to act in harmony with what is around you. That is one thing. The other is to be alive with the magic. Or to say that another way, one thing is to get the servants to obey you, to act the way you want to act, deliberately, because it works, and this will put your character act together. It will make you act in wholeness. The other is to be alive. One of them is called accepting God or accepting Christ as who you are, accepting the life that is the living God living through you. One has to do with actions, what you do. The other has to do with who you are. Those two things. Be who you are, doing what you are doing purposefully because it is effective. We want to gain the ability to listen to instruction from that Source that comes like the dove, like the bird, like Hermes, like Mercury, from God with instructions, and we want at the same time to be responsible for our actions. We want to do and to be. There are three challenges in the school which appear in multitudinous different ways, but they all come back to doing, being and having. I can be. I can do. And I can have.
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If I get those confused, if I get confused between what I do and who I am, then I will have to work out the challenge of unconfusing that issue. If I get confused between who I am and what I have, I have to unconfuse that issue. Do, Be and Have, those three, and those three will be applied in many different ways, but remember those three. We will take them apart, we will look at different applications of them, but those will be the challenges. Remember those three basic challenges. We will turn them in 12, and then we will turn them into 36, and then 3,000 and a few more. But they will all come back to the basic three. I am. I have. I do. And we want to undo the confusion between them, take responsibility for them, and in that, be empowered to be who we are, doing what we are doing, and having what we are having. In the morning, we are going to take the Mysteries of several different countries and several different periods of time. And I want to tell you just this about the approach. The Mysteries are a set of myths, legends, stories and dramas that are told for two purposes. To conceal and to reveal. The Mysteries have their own language, and the language is a language of symbolism, which is real. What that means is that the thing symbolized is the experience of the reality to the initiate; and the difference between a person who is an initiate and a person who is not is that the person who is not thinks that the story is just a legend, just a myth, just a symbol. The initiate knows that the symbol and what is symbolized are one and the same, and it is real. Now if that is just mystery to you, let it rest for the moment and we will talk about that relationship again until it becomes more real. We will talk about the myths and legends of different countries in different periods of time and some things will stand out about them. The similarity between the stories, the similarity between the symbols used, the conclusions reached and the purposes for telling the story. We won't spend a lot of time in the storytelling. We are going to instead go for the purpose behind the telling of it. lam sure you have already heard many of the legends, the fables, the myths of England, of China, of Israel, of Greece, so we are not going to spend an awful lot of time retelling those legends, but we are going to be looking at the similarity between them and what is the active principle in them. What I can do, make work, and come alive in my life to make my life valuable, meaningful and applicable to this moment. That is what we are going to do. We will also be working with some simple techniques and exercises for the application of these, so it won't be just all lectures. There will be some interaction. We want it to become very much alive. What I would like you to do tonight in order to get ready for tomorrow is to look around and see who you don't know. It is going to be necessary for you to be comfortable with this group of people in order to do the exercises effectively. If you are self-conscious because you don't know the people here, make it a point to get to know them tonight. Share something about yourself so that you can feel more comfortable in their presence, so that tomorrow as we begin to interact and discuss things, you will feel free to express yourself and be unselfconscious. So introduce yourself to people. You have permission to reach out and touch them. Introduce yourself and get over this strangeness tonight. Thanks for being here. Reach out and touch someone now just to make contact. Thank you. Good night.
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Unconditional Love
The Unconditional Love Workshop What Love Is Not As we talk about love this weekend, we will being examining the many expressions which love takes. We will explore love, not as a sentiment or an emotion, because that is what love is not. We will explore love as an energy, a power and a force, because that is what love is. We have already talked about love as a survival need, just as important as the basic needs of air, food, water, sunlight and shelter. In our great quest to fulfill this personal need for love, we develop relationships, because we are relational beings and relationships provide us a means and a place to discover and "capture" love. There is a wonderful story about a fish that overhears a conversation between two people on the riverbank. They are discussing this mysterious and magical thing called "water." The fish decides to devote the rest of its life in search ofthe wondrous, but allusive water. He swims away, leaving all behind. After many, many years he returns, and everyone wants to know, "Did you find the wondrous thing called water?" The wisened fish answers, "Yes," and swims away. In our own experience, we may choose to search for love and accept nothing less in its place, devoting our own lives to its pursuit and its expression. Or we may decide to settle for substitutes for love. Those are all the things that people do in our relationships with them that sort of appear loving, but are definitely not loving - all the words and actions that wear a love disguise. Of course, in order to accept the love disguises, we cannot blow the whistle on them. And that is part of what we term the "Great Conspiracy" - pretending that we are being loving to each other, when we are not. Let's look at some of these love disguises. Let's look at dishonesty disguised as love. One of the most powerful examples of dishonesty as a disguise of love is when somebody is doing something that we know is destructive to themselves or to others, and we pretend that they are not doing it. We withhold the truth from them, and we call that being nice to them. When the people who really love them are trying to hold them responsible to truth, we sabotage that by being "nice" and allowing then to continue the action. "I won't tell you what you're doing. I'll be nice, so you'll like me." It is dishonesty disguised as love. It is not loving. It is not even supportive. It is destructive. It is being a "nice guy" at the cost of truth. Dishonesty disguised as love produces permissive parents. "I'll never punish you. I'll never discipline you. I'll never say you're wrong. I'll never call you on your destructive habits. And, that way, I think you'll like me." The interesting thing is - you will not. You will not even respect me, because you will know that I am dishonest. You will buy into the Conspiracy by blaming me, and what you will blame me for is the fact that I did not call you on the Conspiracy. You will not respect me, and you will not love me. And I will not find out what love is. I will settle for dishonesty. I may be nice to be around. But what that really means is I am easy to ignore. I never call you on what you are doing that is destructive to you or to our relationship. The other side of that is, in attempting to be honest I can be cruel. I can be so determined to make you aware of what you are doing, that I forget to be kind. I can believe that what you are doing is wrong, and I can blame you. Being honest means being absolutely honest. I will not pretend that you are doing the right
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thing, the effective thing when you are not. I will not force you to fit into my beliefs of right and wrong by using guilt to manipulate you. When an individual makes an agreement of responsibility and then avoids that responsibility for whatever reason, people who love that person will point out to him what he is doing. People who do not love him will run over to him and support his negativity, which helps him justify not acting responsibly. Those people are dishonest. They are not respecting him. They are not supporting him. They are not helping him. They are destroying him; participating in destruction and dishonesty. But they are nice to him. Other people who also do not love him may go over to him, and say, "Look what you are doing is atrocious; it's terrible. You jerk, look at the trouble you are causing us." That is also not helpful. Just calling it what is - that is helpful. We call it naming the name. And that is as simple as. "I notice what you are doing, and that is alright. I will support you in doing that, but I do notice. And I know that you know, too." That is all you have to say. I can even do it with a look that says, "I notice." I may not have to say a word. I am not going to make you wrong. I am not going to accuse you. I don't want to make you feel guilty. You will do that all by yourself, if you want to, and I will not have to say a word. In fact, all I have to do is be. I don't even have to be in your presence. I can be across town. But you know that I am not going to lie to you because my very existence is honest. If I am honest, I do not have to do anything. The fact that you know that I will call you on what you are doing, and that I will not lie to you is enough." That is love. People who relate in this way are real friends. And the best parents relate to their children in this way. Just a look can be all a child needs to recognize "I am your parent. I support you. I believe in you. I want to help you find the actions that will support life and love in you. I do not want to make you wrong. I do not want to make you feel guilty. And I want you to know that I know what you are doing." Consistent communication of this nature will build such a bond between parents and their children that children will often correct their behavior just because they respect the wishes and wisdom of the parent. That is love. Real existence is honesty. Denial supports what is not. Avoidance supports what is not. Avoidance and denial are dishonest. Remember, though, that love, and supporting what is, does not mean that you have to make others wrong, or that you heave to tell them every time they are doing something you judge to be wrong. It just means that you have to be an example for recognizing what it is, being willing to live with their action, and supporting them even if they are not supporting themselves. You know it is really working when a person avoids you because they are doing something that you both know is counter-productive. They know that if they brought it up to you, you'd tell them straight. You know that they know it because that is why they are avoiding you. And so all you have to do is be. And when you see that they are hurting a lot, then you go to them and say, "It's alright for you to do something else now. If you would like to play this game differently and have some fun in a different way, let us do it a different way now." And you can be supportive without condemning, without criticizing, without judging. Just make suggestions for a different way to play this game for the moment. Here is one ofthe best illustrations of it. If I get mad at a group of individuals, and everybody else is happy and being supportive to the group, I will go off in a corner to be alone. If I notice that someone else is also unhappy, I will go to him or her. We will support each other's unhappiness, but we will avoid the group, and we will talk about the group and we will make the group wrong. But when that other person is back in the group, I can't do that any more. I either have to confront the group or be alone. Now just by rejoining the group, it appears the other person condemned me or judged me or criticized me. What he really did was make me face my self. And he didn't have to do anything to me; he just did something for himself.
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We just don't go to people that we know are going to tell us that what we are doing is ineffective. If we don't want to face what we are doing, we don't go to the people who will tell us. Because we know they will tell us, we have enough sense to avoid them. We already know what the answer is, so we don't need or want to be told. What we do need is someone who is honest enough and loving enough to just be. And their being, and their willingness to support our negativity, is sufficient to help us face our negativity. If we knew, that when an individual is out of sorts he is going to support our negativity, then we make a conspiracy with that person, and then we can be negative together. But we can't do that without wanting to. We are so conscious that we know exactly which people to pick out. We do it consciously; we do it on purpose, which is the nature of the game. Leeching Disguised as Love Another commonly used disguise of love is leeching. I am leeching from you when I require you to be aware of my presence and to feed the fact that I am alive in order for me to be satisfied in being with you. I can't stand it if you are not giving me attention. That is leeching. It is very draining if you are the person being leeched, and you resist. It steals your attention and your energy. However, if you feed me because you want to, you won't be drained, even though I will still be leeching. I leech when I try to take life force from you. I do it by making myself so important in your presence that you cannot ignore me. And I can do that in many ways: I can do it by complaining; I can do it by showing off; I can do it by being entertaining. I can do it by anything that requires that you be actively attentive to my presence. And the second you are not, I find something else to get your attention back again. It can be negative or it can be positive. But either way, it can be leeching. There are so few people in our culture who have grown up knowing it is alright to be loved. Most people are love starved. We have been taught in our culture, especially fathers, especially men, that it is not masculine to love, to express love. And so men take it for granted that others know that they love them without ever really saying it or without being warm enough to show it. As a result, we have children growing up who have never felt absolutely sure that they are loved. So they enter relationships that they think are love relationships when what they are really looking for is someone else to prove their own lovability. If I don't love myself, I have a great need to be loved. And when I enter a love relationship, I'm going to be trying to get you to prove that you love me constantly, which puts a drain on the relationship. Look at almost any marriage, and you will find the drain going on one way or the other. One of the partners is not sure he is loved, and he is constantly doing things to get the other to prove their love. Leeching in love relationships usually comes from the fact that I haven't found myself worth. I haven't found myself lovable. I want to find someone who loves me, and get him to love me to prove that I am lovable, and so I take from someone else what I don't have, and I think that in taking it, I give, but instead, it becomes a drain. Being Needed Disguised As Love The opposite side of leeching is the person who is constantly giving, which is also one of love's disguises. When I am constantly giving, I don't have to get your attention to be with you. If I'm a giving person, I will give you my attention constantly, and as a result, you will want me around you. I am supporting your ego and your own need for attention. It is not any more appropriate than leeching because it springs from my own needs. I have a need to be needed, and the only way that I can "love" you is to know that you need me.
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This kind of giving really looks like love. And we buy into it in this culture by validating people who need to be needed, because we know we can leech from them. These people are giving people -- giving, giving, giving -- and they appear wonderful and loving, but only to leeches, and only while we are leeching. They do not draw on our presence and exhaust us. Instead, they fed us. And, while doing so, they are dishonest because they are denying themselves in order to support us. Parents do that to children. Lovers do that to each other. Teachers do that to students. Partners do that to each other. And each one who leeches or allows himself to be leeched has bought into the Conspiracy. It is alright to continue to do if, if you know you're doing it. When you admit it to yourself or to another, it is called rending the veil. That is all you have to do. You don't have to stop doing what you are doing. In fact, if you try to stop leeching by saying, "I'm never going to do that again," it won't work. You will empower leeching by trying not to do it. What you want to do is become conscious of what you are doing and admit it, own it, and then the power will go out of it because you will notice every time you are doing it, and you won't be able to sustain it. You won't be able to pretend anymore. The thing that maintains the Great Conspiracy is the pretense. Passion Disguised As Love Passion often disguises itself as love. When I see you, and you are beautiful and I get sexually aroused, then I think "I love you." It isn't love. It is an opportunity for passionate, physical involvement with another person, which can be very enjoyable, but should be called exactly what it is, passionate, physical participation with another person. And if we have that with a person we love, it adds a dimension of expression to the love, but it isn't love, and it shouldn't replace love. If I see in you the potential for arousing my passions to a very high degree and I say, "I love you" "You turn me on," I can also encounter another one of these childish syndromes that we go through which says, "I cannot stand to be deprived of something I want. I can't do it. I can't help myself. You have to love me. I'll be in torment if you don't. I can't help loving you. I just can't control myself, even though I know I should." That's blind passion. It isn't love. It has nothing to do with love. But we can express love passionately. If you "can't help it," realize that you had better help it or you will never be alive. It will deny you the ability to make a decision. Release you passion because you decide to, and release it where you want to. And where passion is aroused elsewhere, know that there is a potential for denying your creativity, decision, purpose and participation. Can you imagine anything worse than your body just "going off" without your participation? It is just doing its thing without your guidance. That does not give you life. It is depriving you of life. The fact that it can only be released in that relationship deprives you of a range of choices and the fullness of what life is. Passion is the energy that you put into a physical act or an expression of love or emotion. Doing it passionately is doing it with abandon, without reservation, releasing your total energy. Do it, but with conscious participation. Make decisions; take responsibility for the fact that you make decisions. Don't let yourself say, "I don't have a choice. I couldn't help it." If you do that, you are dead. You are denying your reality. You are denying your Christhood. You can't be Christ without making choices. That is what Christ is - the creator, the chooser, the decider. And you can be that.
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Protectiveness Disguised As Love Protectiveness means that I try to protect you from yourself and everything in your environment. The important thing to notice about protectiveness is why I do it. It is done for the purpose of proving how important I am and how indispensable I am. Protectiveness is most often done by parents with children, but it is also practiced in other relationships, such as by men with women and by motherly women who marry "sons." Our protectiveness tries to protect individuals from sadness, from harm, from mistakes and we call that "love." It is not love when it creates a limitation ofthe other person's experience of life. It can be extremely damaging. But it can also be helpful, such as when our protectiveness becomes a device for teaching a person how to protect himself. If we do it successfully, they will become independent, and they won't need us anymore. Which can be a horrible moment, unless we are alright without them. The purpose of protectiveness is to make myself important. "You need me for protection." Security is an illusion. No matter how good a parent you are, you cannot ensure that your children will survive up to adulthood. There are so many things that parents cannot control. Children will do what they are going to do, in spite of us, rather than because of us. We do no have the control over other people's lives that we like to think we do. But we can be very protective in order to maintain the illusion that we do. It is part of the Conspiracy. It is alright to be protective as long as we don't destroy the other person's options in doing that, and insofar as we are alright with the other person coming to a point where they no longer need us. Over protection keeps the other person from growing, keeps them where they are. Remember that none of these disguises are love. Some of them are functions of love, sometimes. None of them are wrong. They are all alright to do. What determines whether they are loving, whether they are serving or not, is whether we are doing them on purpose, consciously, with conscious participation. When we act by conscious choice, it is supportive, and it can work. Ownership Disguised As Love Ownership means parents owning children, husbands owning wives, and wives owning husbands. And in this society we give certificates of ownership to parents and to married people. The government supports it, so we can pretend that we own each other. You do not own your children. You do not own your husband or wife. And all of the rights that you maintain - the "shoulds" in your relationships - are restrictions and demands of ownership. I don't own you. With that understanding we can make some agreements. If you willingly keep those agreements, we can enjoy love together. If you keep those agreements because I own you, because I have a license and because you should, then you become a slave not my lover, but my slave. I own you. That is true with parents and with children. That is true with husbands and wives. It is true with lovers. It is true with teachers and students. Possessiveness Disguised As Love Essentially, possessiveness is the same thing as ownership. It means being possessive of a person's attention. "I don't want you to have fun unless I'm the cause of it. If you leave my presence, promise me that you won't enjoy yourself. That means that you love me." This is not love.
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What is an alternative to possessiveness? What can I do that does work? What works is when a person enjoys me because they want to, when a person loves me because they choose me. If I have a certificate that says, "You're obligated to love me," there will be no joy in our love. I want you to stay with me only for as long as you totally enjoy being with me. I want to be with you only because I totally enjoy being with you. I want it to be a choice every second. When it gets into negativity, we have a fraud perpetuated by the government. It is not love. Love will require you to be conscious. I want to make you happy every moment that I am with you to the extent that I can, and I want you to enjoy the moments that you are not with me. And if I am enjoyable enough, you will come back, and we will enjoy being together because you want to, not because you are supposed to and not because you are obligated to. I want us to be together because we want to be together. I sell my soul when I agree to be possessed in order to get your love. Jealousy Disguised As Love The result of possessiveness and ownership is jealousy. In fact, if you are not jealous, I won't believe that you love me. It is not love. Ron Smotherman in his book Winning Through Enlightenment says, "You can't have anything you are not willing to live without." That is what jealousy is all about. If I am not willing to live without you, then I will require you to be with me. I will try to own you, and I will use fear to maintain our relationship. That produces jealousy. There is no love in it. It is a relationship based on fear. And the result is that I will never have you; I will never have a relationship with you. What I experience is the fear of not having you. I never experience the joy of having you. The fear of not having you overrides the joy and becomes the working factor in the relationship. Relationships are our point of reference for being alive. We only know we are alive by relating to things, by relating to ourselves, others and the environment. The way that we relate determines whether our aliveness is joy or hell. Flattery Disguised As Love One ofthe things that people do when theytryto become conscious in relationships is think, "Gee, if I never criticize them, if I always praise them, then they are going to want me around." So I flatter them. I am not honest with my praise, and I never give criticism, just flattery. This goes back to the first disguise, dishonesty disguised as love. What that means is I am easy to ignore, and people only want me around when I am praising them, flattering them. What they want is the flattery or the praise, not me. If I am willing to be honest in a relationship, then I will become a tool for their recognition of reality, and they will have to have a real relationship with me. The truth is if you balance your praise with calling things what they are, people will respect that, and even when you are not doing that, people will know that you support reality and honesty and that you are willing to say what is going on. Then people will love and will change, will adapt and will support that. In that case, nobody will take you for granted. People will love you and people will hate you. Whichever they do, they will do it will passion, if you are real. And if you are willing to live with that, you get to be real. People will only treat you as you have taught them to treat you. You teach them how to treat you by consistently responding in a certain way to the way they treat you. If you teach them that a certain word or certain look gets a response out of you, you have taught them to use that word or that response or that look, and they will do it. Some people are susceptible to flattery. What they are teaching you is that is how
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to relate to them. Some people are very susceptible to manipulation. They will teach you to manipulate them. Some people are very responsive to possessiveness in relationships. You teach others how to treat you. I may teach people that the only way to get my attention is to brutalize me. Then I get to be a martyr and blame you. I taught you how to relate to me. Now, if I try to teach you that something is not acceptable in our relationship, it won't be done by my protesting that you are treating me that way, it won't work for me to jump up and down and scream and say, "I won't put up with this." What will work is to leave. Don't be there when a person is doing something that is unacceptable in your relationship. Don't rant and rave about it. Don't say anything. Just don't be there. They will get the message. If you leave every time they do that, they will stop doing it. Now, a child may want punishment. If that is the only form of concentrated attention they ever get, they will do anything to get punishment, and then it becomes a reward. That doesn't necessarily mean ignore them. That means that you need to be conscious enough to notice that it is attention that they are trying to get. If you don't want that action linked to that response, make sure that is not what you give them. Whatever it is they want, don't give it in that moment unless you want them to do that every time they want it. Fill the need for attention at other times in positive ways. "Don't be there" doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take the body away. "Don't be there" means don't let them get the response that they are looking for. If a person is trying to make you angry, don't teach them that that is the way to do it or they will do it every time they want to feel that sense of power over you. If I know that I am always triggered by your doing something in particular what I have to do is make sure that isn't true anymore and not be triggered when you do it. That means it won't work anymore. That means I don't get to buy into it anymore. His action doesn't work for him anymore because it doesn't trigger me anymore. It has no power. I will just diffuse it. It doesn't work. People won't do what doesn't work. If you are uncomfortable and you feel that you are only suppressing your reaction, you can give an unexpected reaction. Respond differently. You can respond, but don't respond in the way that they expect you to. That teaches them not to try it next time. When you act in a predictable way, people will treat you in a predictable manner. They will treat you exactly how you have taught them to treat you. The only thing we can be consistent with is being ourselves. Now if my self is only a tiny piece of the spectrum of what I can be, then I am very predictable. But I'm never my total self. And if I am consistent with being all of me, that means that what I am is totally unpredictable. I operate from all over the spectrum. Where I am on the spectrum at any given moment is my choice, not yours. If I allow my life to be predicted by another, then what I get is lots of peaks and lots of valleys, lots of ups and downs, but I won't have a consistent joy of life because I am not willing to take responsibility for being consistently joyous. What I get is the opportunity to blame everybody out there for everything that is going on in my life. And that is alright. We are not talking about right or wrong or shoulds or shouldn'ts. We are talking about cause and effect. Am I willing to live consciously with what I have set in motion consciously? The My Fair Lady Syndrome Disguised As Love The story of "My Fair Lady" is one of a wealthy, powerful, highly educated gentleman who finds an attractive, but backward, underprivileged girl and takes her into society to teach her wonderful manners. It is also closely related to a syndrome called the "Knight in Shining Armor Syndrome." A friends tells a story of being an unhappy girl, underprivileged, unloved, and then being rescued by a knight in shining armor who looked very successful, very prosperous, very much in control.
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She doesn't love him, but he took her in and she was grateful. She spent twenty years being grateful to him and not loving him. Then one day, she discovered that it wasn't love and that she wasn't grateful anymore. His heart was broken. He didn't know that it wasn't love for him either. He was experiencing gratitude instead of love. He was experiencing her support for his being the knight in shining armor. And everybody else agreed, "Boy, is she lucky to have him," they said. Poor guy. Poor lady. We can do things that look like love that aren't loving at all. I can be your white knight and I can look terribly unselfish by sacrificing myself for you. I can do all these wonderful things to you and appear unselfish while all of the time I am doing it for me. And the extent to which you meet my expectations I get gratitude, respect, appreciation, but not love. It is also called the Aquarian Syndrome. It rules some ofthe people who go out and open drug rehabilitation centers. They are knights in shining armor for society, and their worth is measured by whether or not they save society. They look very loving. It can be a function of love. It is very serving. It gets gratitude and recognition, praise and appreciation, trophies and awards; but not love. People don't love you because they need you. People don't love you because you are meeting their needs. People don't love you because you are supporting them. People love you only if they choose to. The Provider Disguised As Love The provider is the person who is responsible for your survival. And, by God, you better love and appreciate that. The truth is that you cannot love it. You can appreciate it, and that is not the same as love. You will never love anybody because they are providing for you. If you really love them, it will be because they are who they are. It will be loving who they are, not the fact that they are providing. And if they stop providing, you will still love them. But appreciation goes only as long as the meal ticket is delivered. And it is alright. A good cause/effect relationship is appreciation of the things that people do for you. But don't call it love. You can't love the provider until you are meeting your own needs and until that person is no longer needed as the provider. Then, that person can give to you, but not to get your love and not because you need it. That person can provide for you because he or she wants to and because you enjoy accepting it. When you establish your independence and love that person anyway, you will experience love. One of the techniques that we use to get love is to meet other people's needs and at the same time, to make sure that they understand how needy they are and how benevolent we are. How loving is that? "Don't you realize how much you need me? I mean, don't you realize what poverty you are living in? Don't you realize how much you need my support so you can survive? Don't you realize how little you have and how unworthy you are. Can't you appreciate me for what I am giving you? How do all of those questions make you feel? Do they make you feel loved or do they make you feel resentful and unworthy? Maybe you can feel grateful, maybe appreciative, but not loving or loved. You only love when you choose to. Love does not occur when you are supposed to or when you owe it or because it is an obligation. Love is a choice and it only occurs as a result of choice. You cannot love who and what you need. If you want to love someone that you need, you are going to have to stop needing them first. Then, you can choose to love them. Get over your need, and then make a choice. Only then will it be a choice. You might not make the same choice that they thought you would. That is alright because you won't need them. You won't have to please them. They are not the provider anymore.
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They are not the provider of your alrightness, not the provider of love. If you need them to fit these needs, then you haven't found a source sufficient within yourself. And if you can't love yourself sufficiently, you won't be able to love another. If you find yourself in such a situation, demonstrate to yourself that you can live without the external source of support. Then choose to love, not because of need, but because of choice. You can only do that after you prove that you can live without it. And you don't have to do anything to prove that you can live with it. You only have to become conscious and examine your need. Vicarious Living Disguised As Love This is most often done by parents with children. It means that if my life is miserable, I will try to live vicariously through you. I will make you feel obligated to enjoy life so that proves how good I am. I will cancel out or postpone my living altogether to live through you. It means that I am trying to give you a burden that you cannot possibly manage, and you will resent me. You cannot successfully live vicariously. You cannot live through somebody else. And again, vicarious living looks very unselfish. It looks very loving. When you are attempting to live vicariously through somebody else, you do many wonderful things for them but it is because you want to have a vicarious experience of their joy as the result of it. But they will not enjoy it because they will feel dependent. It will make you more important than they are. You become the provider of their needs, and they will resent that. Then, they will have to cut themselves off from you to be independent, and then you are going to be hurt. Then, they may choose to love you, but you will only know it if you are willing to be alive yourself instead of living vicariously through them. Even when they turn around and love you, you won't know it unless you are willingto be alive. Divorced couples often maintain their relationship vicariously through the children. I communicate my hate for you through the children; I communicate my love through the children. I am using them as a vicarious instrument for communication with you. And children can't handle it. We cannot use others as a vehicle through which to experience the world. We can't do it. We can use another person as a point of reference for how well we are experiencing the world, but we cannot experience the world through them. The Choice Is Yours In examining all of these love disguises, the choice remains, that of being alive or dead. As long as we are using the disguises to try to experience what love is, we are dead. We are using substitutes for love. The only way we can be alive is to experience love instead of its substitutes. All of these things can serve as function of love. There is nothing wrong with vicariously experiencing another person's joy. There is nothing wrong with filling another's needs or even in seeking another to help to fulfill our needs. It can be very supportive to have a partnership relationship with another person. And it is fun to do. But if that is love to you and if that is all of life to you, then you have no life outside of it and you are not completely alive. All these things that you can do are choices, used in a particular way, they can be expressions of love. But they are not love. They are what love is not, yet they can all be supportive forms of expression as you learn what love is.
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Emotions
USING REINCARNATION FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH
I think the real purpose for coming together in this conference is not to hash out whether reincarnation is a fact, but what can we do about it if it is, how can we use it, how can it be meaningful. It is a meaningless concept unless it goes to work in our lives in some particular kind of way, and so I would like to try and get a look at how the average person, someone who hasn't had a Reading and someone who hasn't had past life recall, what does reincarnation mean to them? How can we get in touch with the karmic effects of having lived here before? How does it affect the present life and so on? In order to make that concept meaningful, I think we might just start out with the idea ofthe two laws of cause and effect that govern our lives in relation to the past and the present, our actions. The law is called Karma and Grace. The ancient teachers often said, "The Law of Karma always bows to the Law of Grace." And I think that is the most important realization that we can have concerning reincarnation or the present and the past. But in order to understand that, we need to understand both the Law of Karma and the Law of Grace. The most popular idea, I think, of karma is that karma is something that we have done in a past life that returns to us in this life to punish us for doing it. And I think that is a rather poor concept of karma. The whole idea of punishment in relation to karma seems to me to be quite wrong. Karma would better be understood as setting a cause in motion which produces a natural effect. It is a natural cause/effect relationship, and that is important for people to know, people who have not perhaps had a Life Reading, who haven't had past life recall, who don't know who they were in the past or what their past lives were like. So how can we deal with karma in the present? Everything that goes wrong seems to be karmic. How do we know if it is karma or not? Well, first of all I think that we can give you one little test to see whether any of the aggravating situations that happen to you are karma. One little test that you can apply, -- if it happens, it is. So you can end that argument right there. There's no further testing needed. If it happened, there was a cause behind it. That's all it really says. If an effect took place, then there was a cause. Now from the effect, perhaps we can find the cause or more importantly, perhaps we can and we should respond to the effects a little more appropriately. The lecture this morning by Dr. Cranston, really left an opening for all of the things that I am going to say tonight because she said so many ofthem, and what I will be doing now is illustrating, I think, what she said this morning. She said that in the karmic effects on your life, there is a direct link between that and its cause, and that is the best way to remember a time passed. If you want to know what happened in a past life, start with an incident in this lifetime that is not the result as far as you can see of something that you did in this lifetime. Something that happened to you without any good reason, some situation that you found yourself in that seemed needlessly cruel to you and that you cannot find a source for in this life.
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Then, ask what could be the cause of such an incident? What is the other side, what is the opposite half of what is happening to me now? And if you can see what a person might set in motion that would produce that kind of a result, and then try to remember, you might find the source of it. Finding the source of karma or remembering past lives is simply memory. The whole process of going into the Akashic Record is memory because the Akashic Record is memory, it is the stored memory in the skein of time and space of all thought and action. As we think or produce an action, it produces itself, it fastens itself onto matter around us, and recalling it or reading it, as we say, is very much like calling to memory any other thing. It doesn't appear like words on a page. It comes to the surface as if recalling. Now, to get the Law of Karma into better perspective, we said it is not punishment for something done in the past, but a need to learn something in the present, a cause/effect relationship. Let us illustrate that by a karmic effect in a single lifetime, and that should be pointed out, too, by the way, that just because a thing is karmic doesn't mean that its roots were in a past life. In this lifetime, I can set a cause in motion that will produce an effect in this life. Let's illustrate it in this kind of way. I'm going to make a very simple diagram of a way you might see a person if you broke down his consciousness. You could say, this is the conscious self, the level of the five senses. In this level of consciousness, a person takes in all ofthe information through one of five senses. And this sensory input is taking in more information than we can use in any given moment. For example, right now as you are listening to me, all five of your senses are taking in information. You are taking in information about the temperature of the room, the texture of the chair, the odor of your neighbor's perfume, and whatever else in available. And much of that information, you don't want to act upon; you don't want to think about at this moment. And because you don't want to think about it because it would be distracting, you take it and push it down to a deeper level of mind which in effect creates another part of consciousness which we are going to call the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is primarily a storage space for information that is not being used at the present, information that may return to the surface. Now much of what is called creativity in our day and time comes from this subconscious mind. It isn't really creative. It is a matter of putting together stored memory in a new way, perhaps. It is more of a computer like effect. Real creativity comes from a third level of consciousness we are going to call the Superconscious mind. The Superconscious mind is that part of self that pre-existed the body, perhaps. It was there before the body was made and made some decisions after the color of the hair and the eyes and the talents, the abilities the person would have in this lifetime, and it brought forward some memory of purpose of this lifetime. Perhaps the soul record is there. Now obviously there is a very close connection between these two (Subconscious and Superconscious) and it is a little difficult to differentiate between one and the other at times, and as a matter of fact, you can't really differentiate because all of these are one. It's really one single individual consciousness, and we can't split the consciousness neatly into such spaces, but we can realize this.
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The purpose, apparently of this highest self or the Superconsciousness, the purpose is something like a teacher who cares what kind of result I get from this lifetime. I am here to learn. I am here to master the laws of this plane, earth, and lessons come at me every day of my life. If I could call this Superconscious self a teacher, just cast it in that role as a teacher, then I could say, perhaps, that no person ever comes into my life, ever, that isn't carefully screened by my teacher. Every person that I will meet today comes into my life for a specific purpose, and my teacher knows what that purpose is. Now that means that you are valuable to me. You have more value to me as a person because I know my teacher brought you into my life for some reason that has to do with my soul growth. I will see more of myself, more of my purpose, I will understand God better if I use the fact that you came into my life today. Now actually this concept of this higher self as a teacher screening everyone who comes into my life may not be true, but even if it isn't, it works. It works because I care more about other people who come into my life, I am curious. I want to know who they are, why they are there, what they mean to me. People have value. But more than that, I assume that that teacher selects every situation that comes into my life today, every frustrating situation, every trying situation, every hurtful situation. I assume that he chose it and put it there for a reason. Not one single frustrating situation can come into my life that wasn't screened by myteacher. In fact, he selected and set it up. Now, when I walk into these situations, situations that could have destroyed me previously, and I look at them now and realize, "Hey, this is a set-up. My teacher put this person here to act the way he's acting because he knew that I needed to respond to that, and this furious person, who is yelling and screaming at me, the person that before I might have hated and despised for the way he is acting, returning evil for evil, I now have a different feeling him. He is doing that for me so I can grow. You poor fellow, having to go through all of that for me! I will now have a total different attitude toward those who might be abusing me if I know that could not be happening in my life if I didn't need it. Now, that is the idea of karma, that there is a higher part of my own self, a superconsciousness that watches me today in my thought and action, sees my relationship with you, and notes carefully how well I handle that relationship. And if that isn't handled well, if I don't get from you what was there to receive, then my own higher consciousness, the highest that is within me, my own judge, the Lords of Karma as I spoke of this morning, will make a little mark, "That needs to be responded to again." And so I'll meet somebody just like you in a very short time and have another opportunity to react to the situation that you set up for me. And karma is very much like that. I keep drawing to me again and again situations that I am not through with. Now think about this for a moment. It will really give you a perspective on reincarnation if you think about this. Think about your own lifetime in the present and think about the fact that the situations that frustrate you are the same ones over and over and over and over. Are they the same ones that you dealt with 1,000 years ago? You are still dealing with those situations in this lifetime? We can carry these lessons on and on and on just because we are too stubborn to make the change in the way that we respond to a silly little frustrating situation.
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Now, this is where the Law of Karma and the Law of Grace come together and where the Law of Grace can be a way out, a beautiful opportunity for you and me if it works this way. Consider this, these three circles that we have up here, let us say that they are a teenage boy, a young man. This is a very American illustration, by the way. This young man has just received his first car. Never owned an automobile before, but his grades were very good in school and his dad was proud of the way that he was helping his mother in the home, and because he had handled things so well, his father bought him a new car. He's delighted. It's the most important thing in the world. He forgets about everything else. It's bright red, of course, and a convertible, and he makes sure that if anybody meets him for the first time, he is sitting in that car, so they associate him and the car together and realize his self worth, you see. And pretty soon, he forgets all about his school work. His grades go down. He quits helping his mother at home. He doesn't have time. He's polishing his car or driving it too fast down the street. Everything has suddenly taken a turn. His sense of values has gone down the drain. He doesn't care about anything except that automobile. And here's what happens. His Superconscious self gets a little bit worried about this situation. So the Superconscious talks to the Subconscious and says, "Listen we're going to have to warn him about this. He's lost all sense of values. We are going to have to get him back on the right track. Let's give him a dream. So the Superconscious programs a dream which floats up to him from the Subconscious as he sleeps that night. All night long he dreams that his car is chasing him, trying to eat him alive. The next morning he comes running down the stairs saying, "Hey mom, I had the craziest dream last night." His mother is a member of an ARE dream study group, you see, and she says, "You better tell me the dream because those things have meaning. It's important." He says, "Aw, ma, I don't believe in those things." He jumps in his car and drives off. Well that day, his Superconscious self was having tea with the Superconscious from up the street, and this Superconscious says to the other Superconscious, "My human just won't listen. He has lost his sense of values. He's got himself a new car for the first time. He thinks that's all that matters in the world. His grades have gone down. He doesn't help his mother any more. It's really awful. I don't know what I'm going to do about his spiritual welfare." The other Superconscious says, "Listen, my human is the same way. He's all tied up in business. He doesn't care even about other people's rights. He just barrels through without looking either way, without paying any attention to anybody. So one Superconscious self says to the other Superconscious self, "You have your human on the corner of 12th and Vine headed south, and I'll bring mine in from the east, and we'll just make this a karmic situation." Both cars are destroyed. Both of these men come face to face with their lack of putting things into perspective. They have to deal with their sense of values. They have to deal with each one of the lessons they had out of perspective. They are forced to deal with it by the situation. That's karma. Now the Law of Grace, on the other hand, would have occurred if at any point this young man had realized that his values were out of perspective, that his grades had gone down, that he wasn't helping his mother. If he had changed his consciousness because ofthe realization then he would have been a different person, a person who did not need a karmic lesson. Then the karmic lesson would not have come.
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Now that essentially says that it doesn't matter what you did in a past life a great deal. It doesn't matter if you were a murderer, a robber, a jealous person, or whatever, in the past. The only thing that matters is that the seeds of the past situation will be in the present, you will have the same tendencies in the present. And having those same tendencies may cause you a great deal of fear and if so you may draw the results of that to yourself, or you may even repeat the same thing over again. But in either case, the important thing to do is to watch the karmic situations that happen right now and not question so much, "Did this come from Egypt or was this from my lifetime as a ... whatever?" Simply notice that this effect is happening right now. The fact that it is happening means that it had a cause. The cause is something inherent within and I have drawn this lesson to myself now. Now this means that I might see this lesson as something that is destructive, hurtful, painful, frustrating, or if I recognize this in the perspective of eternity, I might look at the situation coming at me and see pure gold. I see pure gold because I know that any karmic situation coming to me is an invitation that I have set a cause in motion and here comes the effect. If I respond appropriately to that effect, I have cancelled the cause and I no longer have that karmic situation to deal with. I no longer have need of it in my life. Then instead of wishing that we could find out about our past lives, instead of trying to dream and recall and remember, we should remember what Dr. Cranston said this morning, that the other end of all of those lives, the outcome of those lives is in the present. They are all revealing themselves to us now. We do, in fact, as she said this morning, have memory of them. We have a memory that causes us to se tu p a situation to respond to the causes we formerly have set in motion. We remember all that we need to remember in order to create for ourselves the situation that we need to respond appropriately to from our past lives, and to continue and complete the lessons that were set in motion at that time. Now, how can I be sharp enough to be sure that I catch these karmic lessons, to be sure that I respond to each one of them, and know that in fact it is karma? I think the best way to do that is to assume first of all that the people who are around me now are very likely people that we have had relations with in the past. There are probably very few people in my life right now that I didn't interact with at some earlier time in history. And I have come together with them in this time, and very often I can feel that when I meet them. Very often I can feel, as a matter of fact, that there is something not finished between me and them, and that it is going to require some balancing, some doing, some loving, to overcome the residue. And when I feel that, knowing that I have something to complete, there is an opportunity already there. Now this realization can breed one of two things. It can breed fear, "Oh my, there is something between me and him from the past and I am going to have to act that out, and he is going to be cruel to me, and we are going to have to .... all of these things." And as sure as I set that fear in motion, I've got myself a real karmic lesson to go through. Or, I can instantly feel that there is something out of balance between us. I can feel that that person already doesn't like me. He doesn't even know why he doesn't like me. He just doesn't like me and he is going to try to do something to express this dislike for me. Then I should know immediately that we have interacted before. We started this some time ago. If I had finished it then by loving him, I wouldn't be dealing with this now. But what is the purpose of saying, "If." What about now? In this moment, now, can I be strong enough in myself to know, I am loved already. I am filled with love and I am secure in love. Therefore his loving me or not loving me doesn't threaten me either way.
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My concern then is not for whether I am loved, but whether he is. And whether I can give my love to him unconditionally, not requiring that he return anything. If I can give love so unconditionally, then whether he deals well with this karmic debt or not, I have dealt with mine. And in order for him to finish his, he is going to have to find a duplicate me because it doesn't involve me any longer. If I can finish a relationship by bringing it to completion so that I have no further need of responding to that lesson, then it is an obsolete lesson, and I don't need to interact with it anymore. The Law of Karma always bows to the Law of Grace. If I would prefer to change what I am so that I become a new person, a person who would not act that same way in any given situation, a person who does not have that tendency, then I become a different person than the person who committed that act, then I am not the person who owes that debt. Now that is an important thing to think about. Reincarnation does not suggest that you were once somebody else. It only suggests that you haven't quit being who you once were. You are still the same person until you change, and changing doesn't mean changing bodies. Changing means a new birth experience. A new birth experience in the sense of becoming a new kind of spiritual being or a new kind of being in relationship to spirit, a new kind of being in relationship to the universe and to the lessons. You know the same thing applies to disease. There are a number of people here who are healers, and the question always comes up in regard to healing. "What if it is a karmic disease? How do I know that I am not taking away this person's opportunity to respond to his karma if I take his symptoms away?" Well there is a little test for knowing whether or not it is a karmic disease. If they are ill, it is. So that is simple enough. Now that we've got that over with, what do we do then, rob the person of his symptoms so that he doesn't have an opportunity to meet his karma? No, as a matter of fact, if you rob a person of his symptoms, all you have done is taken away his language. You haven't taken his disease. You've only taken his means of telling you what his disease was. No healer should get overly concerned with symptoms. Get concerned with cause and make that person a new being who doesn't need to display such symptoms, then you have dealt with the karma, and the symptoms become obsolete. If you want to look good, healers, let me tell you something. Obsolete diseases are easy to cure. Just make sure that the person becomes new inside in his relationship to himself, to his environment, to you and to others. Which means that he is in love. Make sure your patient is in love, in love with himself, in love with you, in love with life, the spirit of life and as he is developing that new love relationship, his symptoms will look obsolete. And then you can look good, put your hands on him and all of the things disappear. Diseases are, in fact, karmic. All of them. But you know, disease is not something that just happens in the flesh. Dis-ease is, for example, a chronic bad relationship with neighbors. Do you know that there are some people who are treated in a specific way by almost everybody they meet? There are some people who are criticized by everybody. If you are one of those people and you blame other people for the way that they treat you, pay attention to this. Everyone, everyone in your life, treats you as you told them to. We are putting out messages all of the time.
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Now when I say we, when I say you, I am really talking about the Super You, the Source of your being, your own Higher Self. That is really you anyway. So there is a part of you that is setting up situations every day of your life. If you begin the day by assuming that every single thing that happens to you will happen because your teacher, your higher self, your source, has selected a set of lessons for you today. Get up in the morning to face the day knowing that a set of lessons is designed and will pop into your life one after another, and as you go through life meeting each individual, be alert in thinking, "This is a karmic relationship. I am meeting this person for a reason. I want to see all that I can see in this person. What are they displaying to me? What do I see in their faces? Is there happiness? Are they radiating? What are they thinking? What kind of backgrounds do they have? How much can I care about him? You know, if you do this, you are going to have peculiar side effects, I should warn you. One of the peculiar side effects of becoming that interested in other people is telepathy, in this way. If I want to know what you are thinking, the only thing that I really have to do is care more about what you are thinking than what I am thinking. If I care more about your thoughts and opinions than my own opinions, I will give up my opinions and hear yours, whether you speak them or not. I will feel and I will sense what is coming from you if I care enough to care what you are thinking, what your needs are, what your concerns are, what I can do for you, how I can relate to you. I will assume that my teacher put you in my life today for a reason because I needed to learn from you and because I needed to respond to you in some way. What can I do for you? If I meet people in this way, I will understand people in a new and deeper way. I will form new kinds of relationships, and most of all I will be alert for that moment when something goes wrong in the relationship. I meet somebody and I am all happy and cheerful, smiling, and they turn around and snarl immediately. Now what I am likely to do in the old life is snarl right back. As a matter of fact, society says that that is the thing to do, "Stick up for yourself." Which really means that you have a perfect right to poison your body with adrenaline just like he did his. Big deal. Thanks for the favor. I want to be sure that I have the right to poison my body by becoming angry because somebody else did. How silly can you get? Better I should notice that person snarled at me for two reasons. One, he has a need and he is displaying to me a symptom. I am a healer. He is displaying a symptom. If I am a healer and he is displaying a symptom, how much sense would it make for me to say, "You're putting out a symptom. I'm going to give you a symptom right back." That's not coming from the place of being a healer. If he is displaying a symptom of his discomfort then it is my opportunity to take the energy of that symptom and transmute it, change its nature, and put more good energy into the world I would like to create for both of us to live in. And even if he doesn't choose to live in the beautiful world that I live in, I will live there anyway. I'll give him an option to join me in a beautiful place. I'll give him an option to use me as an opportunity to change whatever he is feeling. Obviously he can't express his anger to whoever was the source of it. It was probably his boss. He can't snarl at his boss. So here I am. That's all right. "You have a need to snarl, don't you? It's okay, but as soon as you get through, let's both have some fun, okay? Let's both enjoy this instead." By the way, I want to warn you about this lecture. This lecture starts all kind of problems for people because people will sometimes sit there and think, "You know, I'm going to do that. I'm going to live that way. I'm going to go out of here and I'm not going to be angry any more. I'm not going to return evil for evil. I am going to realize that everything is a lesson. I am going to live that way. And this little higher self sitting over your shoulder says, "Oh yeah. We'll see about that." And as soon as you leave, you will find a lesson waiting for you."
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Now that is all right if you recognize that you set that up. That lesson is your first opportunity to really prove that you are now handling your karmic lessons in a different way. This is your first opportunity to respond to karma with grace instead of having the karma wear on you and wear on you until it finally changes you or breaks you. You know, that's the awful thing about karma, -- it's a make or break proposition. Those lessons just keep coming. Someone was saying to me this afternoon, "Doesn't it seem discouraging that we can go on and on and on for thousands of years and never seem to be making any progress?" I mean how far have we come since the days of Abraham. We are still fighting the same old fights. It's really true. But it can change in the present, now. Look at the opportunities that are coming towards you and decide that instead of having that hurt wear on and on and on, you're going to turn it into a situation of grace instead of karma. Look for the lesson in each situation that comes. Instead of being angry or hurt or disappointed or falling into confusion, - think about that for a moment by the way, confusion is another symptom. It is not excusable. It is a cop out. We think that it is all right to be confused, but what we are really doing is simply refusing to deal with the opportunity to make a decision. So don't run around saying you are confused because people will notice that what you are really saying is, "I'm copping out of my opportunity to make a decision." So don't fall into confusion. Don't fall into despondency, they are inappropriate responses to a stimulus, and you know, it doesn't matter really. If you want to do it, do it, but just remember this. If you are falling into depression now because of situations coming at you, just remember that those situations are going to come back again because you responded to them with depression. You want another depression and another? If we learn to live in the now right now, responding to life. You know, we don't have to become psychics. We don't have to learn these mystic abilities. We don't have to be clairvoyant. Respond to the life that is before you, the psychic gifts will come. They will take care of themselves when they are needed, if they are needed. They are always there. Don't wait to be psychic. Don't wait to develop some kind of super gifts. Respond to life as it is before you right now because life is telling you all that you need to know. Your karmic lessons are presenting themselves one right after the other in front of you, and if you respond to them, you are responding to life, and if you respond to them beautifully as if each one, each situation, however frustrating were a gift, and the frustrating ones are a gift, as a matter of fact. If we turn them into opportunities to change instead of reacting as we have before, if we turn every frustration into an opportunity to change, then each little situation comes as a gift of gold and life become precious and worth the living. The past is meeting you now. You have created it. If you are curious to know where you have been, who you have been and what you have been doing, you need only to look at the things people tell you about yourself as you respond to them. People you meet every day will tell you just what you have been busy doing in your past lives. They will mimic it. They will bring it up just as a pantomime and put it before you, and if you can just remember to put your face on them and thank them for telling you how you treated them or somebody else in the past, then you will know how to respond to life in the present. Respond as you think they should have responded if they had done it right. It makes it easier that way. It makes life an opportunity to grow, and it means that life serves you. It takes you another step. It means that you are not a victim. It means you are the creator of all of the things that you experience and that is an important eternal perspective. When you find out that whatever happens in your life now, even the things that other people are doing to you, are things that you yourself have created,
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have designed and have drawn to you. Then you will be aware, "I am a creative being. If I have created this situation, I can create it differently." Creating it differently is moving into the Law of Grace, and when we begin to live in grace in all situations, the laws of Karma are cancelled in each specific situation that we operate, that we face in a new and different kind of way. I think I would like a dialogue with you if we have a few minutes left, so we can take some questions and answers, and we can discuss some ofthese ideas. I did promise someone that I would address the concept of soul mates, and so I probably should answer that as a question first. I want to address the concept of soul mates in this way. The idea of soul mates comes from the feeling that almost every soul is born with in this lifetime. As we begin to grow up, there is a feeling that part of us is missing. Almost everyone has that feeling, that impression, that somehow there is another part of me and if I could just be joined together with the other half of me I could become whole and complete and be all that I am. And I think there are two reasons for that feeling of being incomplete, but I think that it is much more important than finding some member of the opposite sex to join with and become whole. It's more important because the other half of our soul is more important than living with someone else in this lifetime. The other half of the soul is that higher half that we need to join with, and I think our first concern for soul mates is finding the other half of ourselves that is not incarnate and become whole by joining with the highest that is within us. Become whole in that manner. Then from the point of view ofthe whole person, then I should find my life mate which is much more important to find than a soul mate. Theoretically a soul mate is an opposite half of me with a mirror of what I am. According to theory, beings were all androgynous. They had male and female characteristics. When they were split into two, male and female separated and incarnated in that manner. So there is theoretically another side of me that I could come together with. That may or may not be true, but what is true is that there is someone in this life, very likely, who can provide the lessons I need to respond to in this life, precisely the lessons I need. That person may best be called my life mate and it is a person I ought to find and join with for most of my life. But it might be important to know that that person may be either male or female. It doesn't mean that I am going to marry that person. It means I am going to interact with that person because they carry within them the lessons that I need to respond to, so it may be a business partner. It may be a husband or wife; it may be a child, a son or a daughter in your life. The important thing to look for if you are looking for a life mate is that it is the person who has the greatest ability to push the most buttons. Now that may spoil the whole romantic notion that there is a person there that I am just going to be fascinated with because they are the other half of myself. Listen, the person who can provide you the most lessons is not necessarily going to be the most fascinating person you know, but it will be the person most useful to you in overcoming the lessons. Question: Is the Superconscious of all individuals in contact with one another?
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Answer: Theoretically yes. Carl Jung postulated the idea of the Universal Unconscious, which would be like a pool of the Superconscious of all of the various individuals. As a matter of fact that might be what Jesus referred to as the Holy Spirit or a common spirit that men can draw on that knows the will of God and knows the purpose of man. So we could really say that each individual has a Superconscious, but is in contact with the pool of Superconsciousness, that is the pooled consciousness of other individuals, and yes, apparently there is group karma. Karma is met in groups quite often. There is national karma and there is universal or race karma. Question: Do we make only bad or negative karma for ourselves? Can we also make good karma? Answer: Absolutely, you could say that talents are good karma. Question: inaudible Answer: No I didn't say make them good. I did say don't focus on physical symptoms, focus on changing their relationship to themselves, to their environment, to others and their symptoms will go away. Primarily, whatever is being expression through the symptoms will have been changed and the symptoms then become obsolete. Question: Could not the medical treatment be a part ofthe karma? Answer: I didn't mean to imply that we should not treat symptoms or that we should not treat disease, but even the treatment, medical treatment should not be centered around symptoms. It should be centered around cause, and any medical treatment that focuses only on the symptoms and doesn't take into consideration the cause is not complete medical treatment. So I'm not suggesting that we avoid medical treatment. I'm suggesting that treatment of all kinds whether it is from a psychic or spiritual healer, from a medical doctor, a chiropractor or whatever should be focused on finding the source of the complaint, in fact if possible, see if you can respond to the symbology of the symptoms, what the patient is trying to tell you through the symptoms, and respond to that as well as relieving the symptom. Question: Can the Superconscious do wrong? The Superconscious as I have it diagrammed here? Answer: I would say no, however, you need to take into consideration that the ego and the personality are masters of disguise and very often like to appear as a spirit guide, a Superconsciousness, or a master teacher. On the other hand, I personally don't believe that anybody can be fooled without wanting to be. We never lie to ourselves without knowing it. So any time a message comes, - you know people get all sorts of messages in meditation and probably nine out often of them are delivered straight from the ego, straight from what we preferred the answer to be before we entered into meditation. That is the most likely source of our answer. But if we really want to know and in meditation we ask, sincerely, honestly, is this coming from my ego? We'll get a feeling inside that says, "Well , and when that feeling comes, we should have the spiritual discernment to know where our information is coming from. But if this Superconsciousness is our link to the Source of Consciousness, I am theorizing here and I may be very wrong, I'm theorizing that my intelligence proceeded out of a Greater Intelligence. Some Greater
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Intelligence must have given birth to my Superconscious and I am connected to that Source like some kind of umbilicus. That Source must know why I am here, what my purpose is, what my needs are. If I can go beyond my own intelligence to its Source and ask, I don't think the answer can be wrong. I can go to the wrong source, but if I go to the Source, the answer won't be wrong. Question: Where would you put the soul on this diagram? Answer: This diagram doesn't really lend itself to diagramming the soul within it unless you would say that the soul is all of this. The soul is really the vehicle of evolution through which I come that makes for itself vehicles of manifestation. The soul, through the Superconsciousness, will create a body and a personality. The body and the personality are what I usually call my Self, but they are definitely not my soul. As a matter of fact, they are not even my Self. They are vehicles through which Self can manifest. The problem that most of us have in life is identifying with the false Self rather than with the real Self. The false Self is body and personality. Both of those are results, not causes. If I can withdraw from the results and identify the cause, I will identify with the soul, and I would put that in the realm of the Superconscious, except that it would probably take in all three of those. Question: If we associate the soul with this Superconscious self, what then happens to the dark side of the soul that comes into incarnation? Answer: I think what you are referring to here as the dark side of the soul is what I have just referred to as a false Self. It isn't really real. It is a vehicle for expression and it is a response toward society and the world around me, and so on. But again, I said this diagram isn't diagrammed to diagram the soul. I wouldn't create the soul, I wouldn't put the soul on the diagram as a being that is perfect or that has perfect information every time. So it doesn't fit necessarily where the Superconscious is. Ifwe were going to put the soul in the place ofthis, then we would have to say the soul is where the Superconscious is and from there is a cord, an umbilicus to its Source. The Source ofthe soul is what is infallible, and not the soul itself. Question: Tell us a little bit more about dream incubation. Answer: We have a tendency very often to ask God a question and expect an answer. But the problem is we say something like, "Lord what will you have me to do?" And then your mind immediately starts in and says, "Is it this? Is it that? How about this? I could do this. Maybe I could do that." Dream incubation is nothing more than asking God a question and then shutting up long enough to listen. And the best way to do that, the best way to become quiet in the personality and the lower self is to go to sleep, be receptive and listen. Now I should say this about dream incubation, that once you have dealt with dreams over a period of time, you can fool yourself in dreams just as you can in meditation. You can incubate any answer you want, if that is what you want to do. But you can also incubate the truth and respond to that if that is what you seek. The best way to know where your information comes from either in meditation or in dreams is to know what number you dialled. Who did you ask? If you went to the Source of your being for the answer, that is where the answer is likely to come from, but if you asked your question holding a specific preference for the
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answer you have dialled ego, or self, or appetites, but not God. If you release the answer, if you release personal involvement in the answer, then dream incubation is best done, I think, like this. When you go to bed at night, do everything that you normally do to get into bed. You probably take off the same shoe first each night and then you have the same ritual that you go through, and if you alter your ritual it will cost you some sleep. So go through your whole ritual right up to the point where you get under the covers, and then just before you get under the covers, kneel down beside your bed. That is a trigger mechanism. When you kneel down beside your bed, your subconscious mind is going to say, "He's going to pray." It is a trigger mechanism that says you are aiming this thought or this question as a prayer. You can either kneel down or you can do it in bed. The important thing is to go into a meditative state of consciousness, which means get your mind away from the room and the bed. Put your consciousness in a Separate Reality. In other words if you are thinking, "Here I am lying on this bed trying to get an answer to this question, your consciousness is still with you, it is still associated right there with this sensory reality. Put yourself in another place by projecting your consciousness to another place. Even if it is a fantasy meadow or a mountain or a temple, some place that is quiet and beautiful that is far removed from your bedroom, put your consciousness there. Now your visualizing is not meditation but it will begin the process of meditation by getting your consciousness awayfrom the physical, the sensory reality. Once you have gotten there in the quiet, then pray. Pray in the sense of saying, "I am talking now to the Source of my being, whoever and whatever that is. Wherever I came from, who ever I need to get this answer from, I am talking to you and this is my question. And say the question, and then repeat the question again and again like a mantra as you fall asleep. And fall asleep with the question on your mind. When you wake up in the morning before you get up from under the cover, write down the answer to your question. Question: Isn't it possible that the Superconscious responds to events rather than manipulates events? And what about the Superconscious ofthe other people if the Superconscious is setting up all of these? Answer: First of all I think it is much more complex than I have stated, in that the superconsciousness of all of us is working together as a group consciousness and is providing opportunities, but this doesn't take away the fact that it also is responding to my assertion of my will and is providing opportunities. What the Superconscious will do is use my own assertion of my will for a specific purpose, and if it has set up a situation and I refuse to go into that, it simply sets up the situation again. Obviously situations follow me around and I can keep ignoring them, but they just keep cropping up right in front of me, so I'm not sure it's manipulation by the Superconscious - except that we really can't separate the Superconscious from the Conscious. It is always operating through our consciousness, so we really are setting up our own situations and we are setting them up in response to our needs and in response to the needs of others. But I think a lot more communication is going on between us than we are aware of. Question: When a person has a phobia, isn't it possible that the phobia could come from something that happened in the womb in late pregnancy rather than coming from a past life? Answer: This is one ofthose questions that need not be answered either/or. I think it very well might be answered both/and. That the person had a past life experience with that fright and the source of it awakening in this life is an incident in late pregnancy.
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Question: Does life on other planets come into this picture at all? Answer: I am aware of Readings in which people were told that the reason that they entered this lifetime with a particular disposition is because they entered from Venus and encountered people who entered from Mars. And in one specific instance that I am aware of, these were Vietnam War protesters in the United States who had a clash with a Martian named Nixon, and the thing that was being expressed in the Reading was that they were of a Venusian nature which was a love nature, a peaceful and quiet nature whereas the war mongers or the hawks were of a Martian nature and inclined to conflict. However, there are those who say that that doesn't really mean that they came from that planet. It means that they came under that planetary influence, and I wouldn't argue either way. I think for us to think that we are the only occupied planet in all ofthe billions out there has to be the ultimate ego trip Question: In the case of a retarded child, is that the child's karma or could it be the parent's karma to have that kind of relationship? Answer: I think a better answer might be given in this way. I did a Reading for a little girl in California who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. She is, I suppose, between three and four years old. She couldn't walk when I met her. She really smiled. She was one of the most beautiful little girls that I had ever seen in my life. She came into the life of a stockbroker and his wife who were very much social climbers well on their way to success in California, very much interested in getting to the top of the heap. When she came into their life, suddenly they had a different reason for the money that they had. They made several trips to Europe to try to find specialists who could work on her. In a very short time, they didn't have all of this money that they had had before from the social world. But their life had changed to the extent that now they were spiritual seekers. When I did the Reading for the little girl, the Source said this, "Here is a person, a soul, who has mastered most of the lessons available to it. It has a relationship with these two people, a love relationship and is very much concerned. She came into this lifetime as a teacher, having specific lessons to teach. She very carefully constructed a physical vehicle appropriate to teach those lessons. How dare you call it disease." Question: Is it possible that someone else could have a closer awareness of your Superconscious than you yourself? Answer: I think it is not only possible but is very likely. I think other people almost always know our lessons better than we do ourselves because we disguise the lessons from ourselves in order to protect our ego. So even when the lesson is right before us and is as clear as black and white, everyone else can see it and we say, "I don't see what I am doing to produce this." Everyone else can see what we are doing to produce the very lesson that is before us. This is the reason I say to the people that I work with that I would much rather teach them to get their own answers than do a Reading for them because if you get a Reading from someone else, however valid, it is valid for this moment. But if you learn to tap the Source yourself, then you have information for the rest of your life, and not just for the moment, but that doesn't mean there is never a reason to get information from somebody else.
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When we hear information from someone else even about ourselves, what we get is the way we look through another's eyes, something that is not ever available to us, even from within, and that can be invaluable. Reincarnation. I have found that in talking with people who believe in reincarnation almost everyone has a story of their former life. Now, I always find it amusing to ask them, "What has that to do with the present? Is it applicable? Has it benefited you to learn of that life or is it just an anecdotal thing that is interesting? Is it just ego fascination? Is it useful? Has it done any good to learn about your past life? I like to speak of these cases in which it has done some good to consider the possibility of a past life, and I should say this. It has been quite a struggle to deal with the concept of reincarnation. I grew up in a very religious home. My dad was a Southern Baptist minister and I suppose that I should explain to you here in England what that means. In the south of America there is a denomination that doesn't believe in smoking, drinking, cussing, going to the movies or dancing. They are called Southern Baptists, and they are the strictest of the strict. They believe in a very, very literal interpretation of the Bible, and the most horrible thing that we could speak of is to accept such a heresy as reincarnation. So it wasn't discussed in our home, and when I left high school and college, I went to seminary, and it wasn't discussed in seminary either. Southern Baptist seminaries are interesting places where you do not study comparative religions at all. You study the Southern Baptist religion. And if you have an interest in comparative religions, that is a suggestion of heresy already. So I didn't inform myself very well and I was perfectly happy with that until that didn't serve me very well and then I rebelled against the whole thing. I got mad at God and bought a pack of cigarettes. I smoked all of them. It made me very sick. I developed a three pack a day habit, and then I started on beer. I had never tasted a beer before, and I liked it, and from there I went onto sex and all ofthe otherthings. I tried to make up for all ofthe lost time that I had spent in seminary. And I spent ten years going that way. This was a very important period in my life for a reason that I would like to share with you. If you read about people who have made a breakthrough, usually it comes in moments of emergency or great stress or great depression. For me, I produced ten years of rebelling against God and society and my parents and everything else. Just getting it all out of my system until I produced for myself what I call a dark night of the soul. It meant I didn't like me, I didn't like anyone else and I didn't want to talk to God. That was the last thingthat I wanted. It was during that time that I quite accidentally discovered the ability to lose contact with my Conscious Mind by becoming unconscious, in a state that was exactly like going to sleep, at least that is what it felt like. It felt like just going off into a sudden sleep. And when I would wake up, I would find out that I had given a discourse on some spiritual subject. It was very disturbing at first. As a matter of fact the first thing that concerned me was whether this ability was of God or the devil because I wasn't on very good terms with God at that moment, and I couldn't imagine it being of Him. But here was this voice talking about concepts that I had never accepted. They used terms like Akashic Record. I had never heard the word. I hadn't the foggiest idea what it meant. One of the early discourses during this period was about the physical health of a young man who happened to be present and the Source described the conditions in his body, which attracted a lot of attention. After that there were people coming every day for Readings and then the idea of reincarnation came into the picture.
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And the first time reincarnation was mentioned in the Reading, they mentioned an experience of my own. Once it was brought up, I was very curious. Had I ever been here before? Do I have past lives and if so what can you tell me about them? So in the first communication they said, " in your most recent appearance on this earth, your name was William Munsey," and they gave the birth date and the place of birth and they said, "You were a Methodist minister, quite well known in Virginia for preaching about hell." And the interesting thing was his birth date was exactly the same as my current birth date, except 100 years earlier, so I was born to the day 100 years later. Now that is interesting in that when the A.R.E. did research on reincarnation and found one case history to study, they also found that the woman's current birth date was only one day off from her former birth date 100 years before. So she had returned in a cycle of 100 years and one day. Now, when I investigated this man, William Munsey, I found a book of sermons he had written in which he spoke about the same things that intrigued me in this present lifetime. He used the same illustrations, the same words, but to prove a different point. I had come from one way of thinking in that life to a new way in this life, but we were both intrigued by the same things and obviously had a very, very similar personality. When I read those sermons, I started on one that particularly appealed to me. It was so poetic in the way the words were put together, I closed the book and put down and then I went ahead and quoted it from memory. I remembered that sermon well enough to go ahead and deliver it without the book. After that, this memory of being this particular minister came alive for me to the extent that I could remember the death. I remembered dying and I remembered what it felt like. I remembered a feeling of being drawn to some kind of a shining place that I interpreted as a shining city and feeling that I wanted to go there, and feeling at the same time that I had to go back and present what I had said from a different view point. I felt very much torn between going to the shining city and going back to the people that I had preached to all of my life because suddenly I saw all that I had said in a different context. So now watch this, because I think this is an important point when we talk about reincarnation and the purpose of reincarnation. Although outside the body, I had a new and different perspective, when I came into the body again and started to grow up, I redeveloped some old perspectives. Now I think that happens quite often in the incarnation experiences and the point that it makes to me is that the importance of knowing about the past is to realize how important it is to make progress in the present. It may very well be that at the end ofthis lifetime you will see your life from a new perspective, but seeing it from outside the body and putting it to work in the body is a different thing. I have now come to the perspective that I developed while I was out of the body, but I had to grow into it. It is not something that I was born with. I was born with the same perspective that I left with, so that I grew up with the same attitudes and ideas concerning Hell that I had preached in the last lifetime, and in between the lifetimes I saw a different perspective. Let me go on with that same theme for a moment to develop it a little further. In Greensboro, North Carolina, I met a man who was introduced to me as a schoolteacher. And knowing nothing more than that about him, I did a Reading for him. He wanted to know about past lives. And the Source named only one life from the past that was important to him at the moment. He was described as having been a scientist in Atlantis and in Atlantis his work was described as being in weapons systems. The Source said that he developed systems that could destroy huge numbers of people and when it came to the point of really
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realizing the potential of what he had developed, he suddenly dropped the work and became something of an evangelist, trying to change the minds of the people and turn their consciousness to other business rather than building weapons systems. And the rest of that life was described as being one concerned with teaching and ministering to people in a new kind of way, and being very much anti war. After the Reading, I woke up and talked with the man, got acquainted with him a bit, learned who he was. His name is Dr. William Beidler. He is a professor of Eastern philosophy at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, and he told me a really interesting story after that Reading. He said, "For fifteen years in this lifetime, I was a bio-chemist for the United States army." He said "I worked with chemical and biological warfare and one day in the lab, I held up a test tube and realized that the contents of that tube could kill as many as 5 billion people." He said, "I put down the tube, resigned the job and went to India. There I studied with a guru and returned to the United States, went back into the university systems and tried to teach the young to find some greater purpose than fighting and destroying one another." My question became then, if he made that same advancement in Atlantis, why was he repeating that same pattern now? Why did he go back to weapons systems if he had made progress beyond that in that time? I think the important thing to find from reincarnation stories is how often we repeat patterns over and over until we become a different kind of person. One of the most shocking things about discovering past life memories is the similarity of your last lifetime to this one in the things that you had the opportunity to learn. And if you think about it, in the sense of stringing one lifetime together with another one, as on a chain as if there weren't any separation between them, you might see that it would be so, in that we have had 30, 40, 50 years in this lifetime to change, and how different are we in values and abilities in the development of self than we were 10 years ago? If we cannot take this moment and change ourselves, how is it that between times we would expect to change? I think it is more important to realize that what we build in this body we will find carried right over into a new body. In fact it might be said this way. If you understand what the personal Akashic Record is, you might find that in this moment while we are talking and sharing here, there are cells, molecules within your body that are dying and being replaced with new ones. As a new cell is born while I am talking to you, it is born in a particular matrix. The matrix is made ofthe electricity produced by your brain in thought. The thought that you are thinking now, becomes a part of the permanent record of your body and it is impressed right into the cells. As you think a thought, you create an electrical charge. The atmosphere of this room is tenacious of its equilibrium, so you are disturbing that equilibrium and forming a new cell or molecule within that equilibrium, and that cell or molecule has impressed upon it the state of the atmosphere within your body at that moment. In other words, you are building a record literally into your body; you could say your body literally is the record of thought and action that you have built in this lifetime. Now, that is interesting but what about past lives? Where does the memory of that come from? Where is the Akashic Record of my past? Interestingly, every new cell that I build in this body now carries not onlythe record ofthe moment in which it was formed, but it also carries forward the record contained in the cell before it. So it duplicates the previous record and adds to it the current moment. And I think that you will find that all of that stored memory, when this body is finished and when I make the cycle and return here to take a new body, I will bring with me that record, a cell, an Akasha, and in that very first cell that is formed from the DNA protein
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chain, I will have a record of what I have built before and that will be the beginning of this new body. So this body is built literally with the strength and the weaknesses of the last body. One of the most vitally important things that we might learn about reincarnation, if it is a fact, is that right now by our actions, by our thoughts, by the way we are using our body and our opportunity, we are at present building our future body, opportunity and relationships. It has been said, by people discussing reincarnation, that you choose your parents. You choose the conditions under which you enter and perhaps you choose the group that you enter with. I don't doubt that that is so, but how is the choice made? Are there groups of prospective parents lined up and you say, "I pick that one?" As a matter of fact, the people you are going to return with are being chosen in the present moment. Right now, by the way that you are treating someone in your life, you are very possibly choosing your future mother in law. If you don't finish the job that you started with your current mate, that is where they will be in a future time. The whole point is to learn that now in the present moment, I have an opportunity to change. Now the thing that seems most important of all to me about reincarnation, is that the future depends on what I do now, and that what I am now is a result of past opportunities and experience. Just the consideration of that can make the present moment much more worthwhile for me. It makes it of much greater concern to me to use right now to change in order to become what I would like to be in a return, to treat my body in such a way that I will have a healthy instrument upon my return, to care for things that are given me, to appreciate them so that I will carry that appreciation with me into a new time. And know that if change can happen, it is going to happen now. You know, I don't know whether reincarnation is a fact or not, nor do I care a great deal. I do know one thing, considering the possibility has changed my life, has made the present moment more important, more worthwhile and has made relationships more important. Speaking of choosing your life in a future time, let me tell you one more story that deals very much with what we were discussing this morning, - group incarnation. I was in North Carolina and did a series of Readings for a number of people, three people in the same family. First the husband came for a Life Reading, and he was told of a very adventurous life when he had lived in England, had travelled from England to India and had been a friend of a very well known explorer. They didn't explain who the explorer was, but they told him several things that were the background for the current interests in his life. He is a builder. He flies his own plane, and he doesn't like to be tied down. There are lots of similarities between this life and that life. But there wasn't anything of outstanding importance it seemed in that lifetime except they did give him a name, which meant that maybe there was a possibility of tracing that life. Not much more was said about it until his wife came for her Reading and her Reading was very interesting. She asked the question, "Why am I so concerned with women's liberation in this lifetime?" She was one of these outspoken advocates ofthe rights of women in the United States, and she was wondering where this developed. It isn't in her family. He parents weren't that way. Her mother, her sisters don't have particular interest in it. She wondered why she had such an interest.
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And the Reading said, "You lived in Calcutta, and you were the sister of a ruler there, a sultan. And during that time women weren't very well recognized, had hardly any rights at all. You had to keep your face covered with a veil and you very much chaffed against all of these restrictions upon your liberty and your expression. The Source went on to describe an incident. "You were at a dock and saw some Englishmen coming off a boat and you lowered your veil in a flirtatious way. The Englishmen followed you to the palace and spent all afternoon with you. It became quite a famous friendship and you lost your life because of it. The sultan had you beheaded because of your friendship with these Englishmen and because you had desecrated womanhood in that time. And it was because of this that you have come back in this time with the determination to liberate women from those kind of bonds." A couple of days later, her husband's brother came for a Reading, and then the story pieced itself together. The Source said, "Your name in that lifetime was Austin Henry Layard, an explorer from England who went to India," and the Source described a number of his travels. The incident in Calcutta was again described, when he had met a sultan's sister, gone to the home and become familiar with her and how she had lost her life because of it and so on. So all of these pieces of information tied together. Now this brother was an historian and an archaeologist, so he was very much interested in this past lifetime, especially when he heard that Austin Henry Layard had been an archaeologist, by accident, actually. He was an explorer who had stumbled upon the ruins of Ninevah and had begun the excavation of the ruins there. So in this lifetime he comes back interested in archaeology, continuing what his interest became in that lifetime. The interesting thing is that in looking up the archives of this family, we found a personal diary of Austin Henry Layard, and in the diary was written the story ofthe sultan's sister. So he found a record of both his friends, who he had travelled from England with, one is now his brother, and the husband ofthe girl that he flirted with in that lifetime and caused her to lose her life. A tangled mess. I had some really interesting experiences dealing with the concept of reincarnation and coming to my own acceptance of it as meaningful in my life. My dad still is a southern Baptist minister and while he is interested in what we are doing, he is not particularly interested in reincarnation. But we did have a family incident that caused us to have to deal with the idea of reincarnation. It happened like this. We teach a study course that Sir George [Trevelyan] made reference to a few moments ago, Inner Light Consciousness. And in Inner Light Consciousness, we teach the technique for asking a question at night just before you fall asleep and receiving an answer in your dreams. It is called dream incubation as we mentioned earlier. My dad took the course, and he decided to try dream incubation. So that night he did his question and he fell asleep, and the next morning I met him at the breakfast table and he said, "Well son, I tried your technique and it didn't work." I said, "Oh really. You didn't have any dreams." "Oh, I dreamed all right, but it didn't answer my question. I said, "What was your question?" He said, "I asked about this silly business of reincarnation." And I said, "Would you like to tell me the dream?"
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He said, "I dreamed I was walking down a country road and in a field beside the road there was this beautiful young blond haired girl with long pigtails, and she had been murdered, just brutally murdered in that field. It was just really awful." And he said, "I went on down the road a little ways, and on the other side, the left hand side ofthe road was a little red schoolhouse and this same girl came skipping out ofthe schoolhouse, laughing and singing and looking very happy." And he said, I asked her why she was so happy, that I had seen her get brutally murdered just down the road a little ways," and she said, " Every time I get murdered, I get good grades.'" He couldn't imagine any connection between that and reincarnation. He wasn't about to accept that dream as having anything to do with reincarnation, so we let it go for a while, didn't discuss it much but he always brought it up. We were sitting at lunch one day and suddenly he said, "I think you are doing a really good job with what you are doing, but I still don't buy this reincarnation business." And I thought, "Here we go again." But just as he said that, something started happening inside me and I felt this overwhelming realization of who he had been in a past life. And I looked at him for a moment and I said, "Dad for as long as I can remember when I was growing up, when I used to hear you teaching Bible, you spend a lot of time on Solomon's temple and you described it in exquisite detail which I have never found in Scripture. You have always had more knowledge of how that was put together than I have been able to look up in my research." I said, "Could it be that you were one of the builders in that temple?" And suddenly tears were flooding down his face, and he said, "I don't want to talk about it any more." Unfortunately for him, my mother remembered a past life right after that, and so for her the idea of reincarnation is real, the memory of the past life made eternity real for her, made it real and believable. Now, there are dozens of other case histories from the Readings that I would like to share and we may have more opportunityto talk about some ofthe others. I am fascinated with how many ofthem were in England as a matter of fact, and one not so far from here. There was a doctor in Virginia Beach who had a past life in Bristol, England, and this was a life that really made a difference in the present because when he got his Reading he was told, "You were a doctor in England..." and very few other details were given, but the Reading did say, "You were interested in unorthodox healing in that time and developed a great ability to use colored lights in producing healing and it would be a good idea for you to pursue that again in this time." He had subsequent Readings that gave him more information about the doctor he had been, so he looked up the records and he found a painting of himself. He has it hanging in his office now. They look like duplicates. He looks just like the painting. He has found books that he had written in that time. But most interesting of all, he set up a color research laboratory in his office and began to work with it. He became very well known in the United States for using color therapy for retarded children, he got really interesting results with these children who were able to function better by using this concept of light therapy. For me, the answer still comes back to the same thing. Something that I describe like this to see if it can put the idea of reincarnation into perspective. If one of us should die while I am talking now, perish the thought, but I think what you might experience is something like this. Suddenly your body would become heavy, hot, tired and restrictive, like last year's overcoat and you would very much want to get out of it. And when it got too much to hold up, too much to bear, you probably would slip it off and come right out of it and your body would tumble over onto the floor. All the rest of us would freak out and you would wonder what we were getting so excited about. You
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would be standing there free and feeling good, and thinking, "Why are they making such a fuss about that old thing. I took it off because it wasn't comfortable any more." And then you would try to tell us, "Don't worry about that thing." And the next thing that would happen is, to your horror, you would realize that you can't communicate with us, there might be a medium or two in the group but they may be too busy with the body at the time to pay any attention. And suddenly you would become aware that everything that you had invested your time and energy in is now in another dimension. And looking at your life, you would begin to think, "Why in the world did I work so much on acquiring this and acquiring that, all of which are now on that other plane of existence. Here I am still living and I didn't put any time into developing where I go from here? What did I do about soul growth and the things that are really important from an eternal perspective?" And then soon, probably, you would find yourself in front of a tribunal, a group of distinguished gentlemen called the Lords of Karma, and standing before these Lords of Karma you would say, "Listen, just give me another chance. Let me have another body and this time I promise, I won't get distracted with my bank account and cars and owning my own home. I'll work on it, I promise I'll work on it." Do you remember saying that? I strongly suspect that is how we got here.
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Emotions
YOU ARE NOT THE TARGET If you had attended one of the great mystery schools of ancient times, an early lesson presented by your teacher would have been to try to deliberately upset you. It may have happened something like this: Your teacher is shaking hands with a visitor while you are standing beside him. Both the teacher and the visitor are ignoring you. You keep wondering why they are treating you so rudely. As long as you continued to feel this vulnerability your teacher would keep putting you into situations where you felt ignored or embarrassed. These situations would continue until you realized that you feel the way you choose to feel, not because any external set of circumstances caused you to react with anger, hurt, rejection, or pain. Does that sound familiar to you even now? Do you feel he way you choose to feel? All of this may be just theory at first. You listen and say, "That sounds nice. I would like to construct a new way of thinking, a new way of acting, a new way of believing, but it is such a lot of work" You are right. Taking charge of your life does require a lot of work and a lot of discipline. You will have to watch what is happening to you and how you are reacting. You will have to analyze where you are a victim and discover how not to be one. YOU ARE NOT ALONE You are not alone. You have the unfailing help of an inner teacher. Now this may not be true. It cannot be proven empirically. It can work experientially if you live with a belief that it is true. You can try this little experiment and see if it is true for you. It can work experientially if you live with a belief that it is true. You can try this little experiment and see if it is true for you. Begin each morning feeling that nobody will come into your life by accident. There is an inner teacher who is involved in every moment of your life and he will put each person whom you meet in your life for a reason. Some will be catalysts to which you have the choice of responding to as a victim or a master. For example you meet some disagreeable individual. You tell yourselfyou COULD be agreeable, but look how this other person is acting. Already, you are responding with feelings you don't want to have. Such a person can ruin your day. You have a choice. You can, instead, regard him as someone whom your teacher has brought into your life for a purpose. You are not going to give him any power over you. Perhaps you should even be grateful to him for going through all that unreasonable behavior to enable you to learn and grow. He must feel miserable or he wouldn't act this way. Probably you really should thank him for undergoing all of this misery just to allow you to discover a new and better response. If you can think in this manner, you will appreciate every single experience of your life. When you begin to use the Nine-Step Process, you will begin to realize that everything that happens in your life that produces an emotion is, in fact, an opportunity to learn. If you turn every one of these experiences into lessons, then you will be able to abort the emotion before you feel it and that is even better than processing the emotion through the Nine Steps after you feel it. If you meet the same old
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lessons with the same frustrations every day, then you are patterning these frustrations into the very cells of your body. Your cells are being recreated constantly, both from the foods you eat and from your attitudes, thoughts, and emotions. Cells created during periods of imbalance, frustration and stress undoubtedly build ill health into the body. As long as you demand your right to be angry and to produce conflicts, you are demanding your right to build illness into your body. If you learn to be a master instead of a victim, learn to think and act in a new way, you will build health and wholeness into your body. A GIFT OR A THREAT? When a person expresses anger and directs it to you, think of it as an opportunity rather than an attack. It is a challenge. It may require that you take one little step at a time. Overcome one thing, then another. It will take some work. You are going to have to remind yourself at the beginning of the day, every day, "I am in school today. That is the very purpose of this day." Then, at noon, stop again, and say, "I am in school today. There is a teacher in charge of what I am experiencing all afternoon. And if I am on my toes, I am going to watch everyone who comes into my sphere of existence. Everyone who comes into my realm of consciousness is a potential lesson-bearer in my life". And the second someone starts to do something outrageous or unkind, recognize the lesson. If it is something that requires that he be in an absolute rage, red-faced, smoke coming out of his ears, then you know that the poor guy is really going through some discomfort while he is yelling at you. Instead of being incensed that he would dare say such a thing to you, you can look at him and think, "You poor guy, having to go through all of that because I need this lesson." You will experience (instead of outrage), compassion, caring, or at least interest in what is going on. There is just no sense in reacting the way you are used to reacting. If somebody, for example, hurls an insult about you or your family, there is one oftw o things happening. He may not believe it at all and he may be trying to hurt your feelings and make you angry. If that is what he is doing, then that poor fellow has a problem and that is all you need to notice. Why should you care what he says when he doesn't even believe that it is so? Are you going to let this poor, unstable character have control of the w aythat you feel? How ridiculous! Itisjustinappropriate. The other possibility is that he really believes this insulting thing and you fly off the handle, lose your temper and react to him. Then what has that served? Probably, it will reinforce his belief. What is the appropriate response? If he really believes this thing then you should, from a point of security and confidence, disencumber him of that misperception by either informing him or demonstrating to him otherwise. And if he doesn't believe it, but is only trying to make you angry, then all you have to do is to demonstrate to him that he does not have that ability. It is that simple. In either case you have decided not to be a victim, but a cause, a master of the situation. YOU ARE NOT THE TARGET Of one thing you can be certain. You are not the target. When people are being unkind, mean, selfish, don't believe that you are the target of what they are doing. Don't be so selfish and egotistical to think that you are what matters. It is their pain that matters and that is what they are lashing out at.
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People who think they are the target get to take the abuse. If you realize that what they are putting out has nothing to do with you and that they are just putting out a message that they are hurting, then you can be supportive. You don't have to take it personally. When a child is screaming, "I hate you," It does not mean that at all. It means that he is not sure that you love him., A child will never scream, "I hate you," at a person who is unimportant to him. He is asking you, "Do you approve of me?" "Am I alright?" Do you love me?" Just about everybody in the world is asking those same questions, and often they do it in the same convoluted, negative, self-sabotaging way as the little child. TESTS OFALRIGHTNESS Nearly all of the people in the world are trying to make sure they are alright and one of the ways they test their alrightness is to ask somebody else. The most obvious people to ask first are your parents. You try to get your parents to tell you that you are alright. Little children want to know if people find them attractive, intelligent, talented? They start thinking, almost from birth, "If people don't think I'm alright, it will be terrible." It's the part that says, "It would be terrible if they don't," that hurts you. It's nice to know if they do, but the truth is it's not terrible if the don't. You can live with it and not be upset by it, if you choose to. Maybe your parents don't appreciate you. Maybe they don't think you're intelligent or talented or beautiful. And, maybe, even if they do believe all of those wonderful things about you, they only think it because it will make them more appreciated and it has nothing to do with you. That can really be a shock to find out, but it probably is true. When mommy thinks her little Johnny is the most brilliant child in the school, what she wants is to believe that that means she is the best mother in the school. That's why she wants Johnny to be so talented. It doesn't have anything to do with Johnny. It has to do with her own ego and her own self-need. Mothers and fathers probably don' consciously recognize their motivation. This selfishness comes from everybody's need to feel alright and to get positive feedback from everybody else. If other people appreciate you, then that means you are wonderful. Right? No, it doesn't. It means that other people are not sure that they are alright. They think that you are a powerful person and if they appreciate you, then you will give appreciation back to them. Their attention is on themselves. You ultimately learn that when you are standing around wondering what people are thinking of you, they are wondering what you are thinking of them. You find out. They're not thinking anything about you, they are thinking about themselves. Everybody on the face of this earth is concerned with survival. You have to be in order to survive, and for that reason you think of yourself. When you give other people the ability to decide whether you are worth while or not, you set yourself up to experience hurt and rejection because others will agree you are worthwhile only as long as they think that it's going to make them look better. The second that it doesn't appear to be in their own best interest to be supportive of you will suddenly change their message.
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YOU ARE WORTHWHILE The conclusion is obvious. You are worthwhile. If you happen to be religious, then the only evidence you need for the fact that you are worthwhile is the fact that you are alive. How did you get here if God didn't believe that you are worth living! When you look at it from that angle it seems unbelievable that you could ever think you are not. How did this convoluted thinking begin? By people wanting to be more powerful than they are. "You not only want to feel good about yourself; you want me to feel good about you, whether I like it or not. And I don't matter. How I feel about myself doesn't matter. It's how I feel about you that matters. So you want all of your attention and mine, too." That's the fall in the Garden of Eden. You are trying to be as God and one of the ways that you can be as God is to make me dead and you alive. The only thing is that once I am dead, and you are alive, you realize that you are the only living person in a desert of dead people. When you realize that is not what you want you will start making me alive again. You will want to be a living person among living people. You, in fact, want to be an appreciated person among living people. You, in fact, want to be an appreciated person among appreciated people. You don't want to be a wonderful person among a bunch of people who are so unappreciative of themselves that they are worthless. You don't want to be around worthless people. You want to be around worthwhile people who know that they are worthwhile because they are people who contribute. As soon as you realize that, you will get over your selfishness. It is only after you learn to appreciate yourself that you will appreciate me. You won't be afraid to appreciate me because you won't make it a contest. And if I do make it contest, you will be confident that you are not the target.
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Paul Solomon Lectures

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

ISTHE BELIEF VALID? D O ESITSERV E YOU?

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Paul Solomon Lectures

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Paul Solomon Lectures

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Paul Solomon Lectures

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Paul Solomon Lectures

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

List of key elements:

Europe - foreign land - late - fear - feeling rushed - overwhelmed - packing

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Paul Solomon Lectures

Dreams and Sleep Preparation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Dreams are the Judgment of The Lessons of Life

Recording Your Dreams

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

The Three stages of Dreams

Three Levels of Self

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Steps in Dream Interpretation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Dream Symbol Examples

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Cracking the Code

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Brain wave rhythms

White Throne Judgment

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

Some dreams are precognitive.

Make a list of 500 people.

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation

The Akashic Record

2008 The Paul Solomon Foundation