The Magical Life

The Real Story of The Three Little Pigs

Samantha — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 19:56:00 GMT

I was chitchatting with my son the other day, and he said that even though he thinks it will be fun after the shift is complete, that if he had to choose a time period to be born into, he’d choose this time period. He said that it was exciting to move from one set of strongly held ideas into a group of ideas that are so radically different. He’s got a point.

Individuals born in the last century and moving into this one are mavericks. They’re individuals who thrive on challenge. Because this time period doesn’t feel like a shift in perception to me; It feels more like a flip. We’re taking the idea that almost all power is held outside the individual and moving into the idea that all power is held by the individual. These two ideas are so different that they seem opposite of one another.

Sometimes it’s good to look at where you’ve been and where you’re going in order to give yourself a boatload of credit for where you are and your chutzpa for participating in this reality at this unique time.

We’re all in process, moving from one paradigm to the next. Plenty of ideas that will soon be outdated are still present and rearing their heads each day. For example, in a universe where all power is held by the individual, the idea of working hard is outdated. An all-powerful being doesn’t have to work at anything. An all-powerful being explores. Yet, for the most part, hard word and struggle are still portrayed as valiant expressions. This is a last century concept. This is the before mode. The before mode is just dandy, but it’s the platform from which we’re going to be taking off into another platform.

But let’s look at that platform for a moment. I think the story that illustrates the belief structure of the last century quite well is the story of the three little pigs. For those of you who don’t know the story, it goes like this.

The Last Century Story of The Three Little Pigs

The first little pig plays music all the time, and doesn’t work.

The second little pig works on his house, but he doesn’t work hard. He manages get it together enough to construct a house of straw.

The third little pig works diligently and, because of his determination, he builds a house of brick.

Along comes a wolf and threatens the first pig, who doesn’t even have a house to hide in. He goes running to the second pig, who takes the first pig into his straw house. The wolf blows that house down, so the first and second pigs go running to the third pig who, because of his superior work ethic and fine construction materials, saves the day.

The idea is that it’s irresponsible to play (the first little pig), that it’s lazy and dangerous not to work hard (the second little pig), and that you’re only safe if you keep your nose to the grindstone (the third little pig). The underlying assumption is that it’s an unsafe universe (the wolf). In sum, this is a perfect picture of the American work ethic, and the reason for that ethic.

Once again, these ideas are a platform for experience. They’re not right, and they’re not wrong. They will, however, yield a particular kind of experience, and as we move along it’s not the outcome that most people are yearning for. In fact, some of these ideas act as blocks as people try to apply reality creation ideas in their daily lives.

In the old paradigm, a good, moral, responsible person is a hard working person. These seemingly innocent associations can be a bugger when you actually try to incorporate the idea that you’re living in a safe and giving universe. As you try to trust that you can have what you want without working hard for it, as you try to become more experience-oriented as opposed to outcome-oriented, you may find yourself rather frustrated.

There are many channeled authors trying to guide people to be more playful and light, and many of us struggle with this because if we do that won’t we be eaten by the wolf? A serious person (read: a person who understands that life is not on your side) who pays her bills and is compassionate to others is concerned about the state of the world, right? If I’m not serious and focused on the dangers, then how are the bills going to be paid? How will my friend who is struggling know that I care? How will the world become safer? I have to be vigilant. I have to watch out. I have to anticipate all the things that could happen to me and then take action to make sure those things don’t happen. Anything less than hard work, tempered with a good dose of seriousness and a side of worry is a threat.

These ideas are a snare. So let me tell you a little secret. There’s another version of the story of the three little pigs. It’s the story that belongs in this new era. It’s the real story. Here it is.

The Real Story of The Three Little Pigs

In the real story of the three little pigs, there is no wolf because the universe is on the side of the pigs. Therefore, the pigs know that there are no dangers.

The first little pig has such trust in the world in which he lives that he freely expresses his joy through music. He doesn’t worry about the daily necessities because he knows that the world is abundant and that his needs are always taken care of. This isn’t wishful thinking on his part. He has actual knowledge of the mechanics of life.

The second little pig, like the first, loves life. He loves experimentation. He loves trying things out. He’s an inventor. He’s working on a new way of constructing houses, using materials that are abundant, natural, and self-generating. He hasn’t quite figured out the best method to employ yet, but he enjoys the process. Even when his inventions fail, it doesn’t bother him a bit because his interest is in the study of new ideas.

The third little pig is a mason. He loves the feel of brick and mortar. He loves to be outside in the fresh air with the birds and the wind and the sunshine. He loves to work with his hands. And he likes the immediate feedback of his work. Each day he can see his accomplishments as the walls that he builds get higher and higher.

One day, after he’d finished his house, the third pig is bored. “I need someone to talk to, some excitement in my life,” he says to himself. “The house feels empty. It’s too big.”

Then he has the good fortune to meet the first pig, and the third pig thinks, “This is perfect. I need to be around music, and this guy is so expressive and free. He’s a breath of fresh air.” So the third pig invites the first pig to stay with him for a while.

Then the third pig has another stellar day and meets the second pig. The second pig is so full of ideas and always evaluating and thinking. The third pig is impressed. He thinks, “This guy would be a wonderful pig to bounce ideas off of. New ideas don’t come to me so easily.” The third pig decides to invite the second pig to stay with him for a while. After all, he’s got plenty of room. In fact, the house echoes when it’s empty. He enjoys the company.

The three pigs are sitting around one evening, and the second pig says, “I can’t seem to get the construction of my straw house right. Maybe I shouldn’t use straw. Maybe I was wrong about straw. Maybe it won’t work after all.”

The first pig, who’s an abundance kind of pig says, “Stay with the straw. It regenerates. And it’s everywhere. It’s a great material.”

The third pig says, “I find that bricks work well in construction. Maybe you can find a way to turn the straw into bricks.”

The second pig says, “Like a bale?”

The third pig says, “Yes, like a bale.”

And there you go. The straw bale house was invented. It was invented in a safe universe, where many different lifestyles contribute to a plethora of ideas and experiences. It was invented in a universe where diversity of perspective and experience add to the richness, and underlying quality, of life.

This is where we’re going. We’re headed toward a platform of ease, appreciation, and exchange. And that does not mean hard work. It means that following natural impulses and inclinations will become primary. It also means that a fundamental trust that those impulses and inclinations add to the quality of all life will be the norm. In practical terms, it means that the diversity of working styles and living habits and ideas will be valued. Differences will not be viewed as threatening. There will be no wolf.

More importantly, people will no longer measure their value by what they do. Their value will be taken for granted. And if they measure their life at all, it will be by the level of trust that they afford themselves in any given situation. In illustration, they’ll feel comfortable going to bed at 3:00 a.m. when everyone else in the neighborhood is in bed by 10:00 p.m. They’ll feel comfortable not producing any product or service when many of their friends may find joy in doing just that. They’ll speak their mind even when those ideas might be contrary to what everyone else may be saying in that exact moment. They will be confident with their everyday acts, knowing that even when they don’t see how those acts fit into the bigger picture, those acts are still playing an important role nonetheless. In other words, in a safe universe, there’s a great deal of comfort with the act of being spontaneous and natural.

There is tremendous freedom to be had now and into the coming years. And that freedom doesn’t have to happen at once. It’s fascinating to go from the belief that you have to corral yourself, discipline yourself, organize yourself to the idea that spontaneity, impulses, desires, intuition are not only trustworthy but valued and fundamental attributes. I’m talking about moving from a state of constraint to a state of ease. These are very different ways of existing, and feeling the difference creates a level of understanding and experience all its own. In other words, in a very real way, the act of moving from one paradigm to the other is really the adventure itself.

The Battle Between Desire and Trust

Samantha — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:02:00 GMT

All battles in any form are internal. They’re the battle between two elements: desire and trust. What causes conflict in most people is that they give birth to a desire, and then they grow angry with themselves that they would have the audacity to give birth to a desire that is plainly not possible. In other words, they give birth to a desire and then distrust that desire at the outset. This is a very common phenomena.

Here’s a typical desire: “I want money, but I don’t want to work for it.” The objections to such a desire are immediate: “That’s lazy. That’s not the way the world works. That’s a dangerous thought; you could end up on the street with such a thought. It’s immoral to want something without delivering something in return. How dare I even think such a thing. My desires just might lead to my downfall.” And the objections continue.

Now, in reality, the objections are irrational. There are infinite ways to receive money without working for it. You could find out that your house is worth much more than you thought possible;You could receive an insurance refund, or a tax refund, or a renters rebate, or a gift of money from a friend; you could win a contest, you could be asked for the rights to your life story; you could be compensated for something you invented or created; you could find out your crappy little desk is worth thousands of dollars; you could find money behind the sink as you were trying to pull the cat out from under there (as happened with us); you could inherit money; you could receive restitution for something you didn’t even know you had a right to. Use your imagination. The possibilities are endless.

And yet, for some reason, many people think objections are rational. Objections are always irrational. They’re a form of purposeful obstruction. They’re an argument in favor of limitation. Ask yourself: Is limitation ever rational?

People who have a habit of thinking and speaking limitation will tell you that limitation is rational because it happens. So what. Just because something happens, this does not mean that it has to happen. It means that it’s one option. It’s like standing two feet from a cinnamon roll and saying, “I can’t have that cinnamon roll because I can’t reach it.” That’s absolutely true. You can’t reach it at that moment, but standing in one place is a choice. It’s not a picture of reality. It’s a statement about the choices you’re engaging. Because, with a couple of steps, you could have that cinnamon roll, but if you refuse to acknowlege the movement of your feet as a choice then you won’t engage the action. This applies to all desires. You can’t acknowledge limitation and expect anything to move in the direction of what you want. You have to make the lack of limitation rational.

If I had a dime for every time someone told me I couldn’t do something, I’d be a very rich woman. Sometimes, my mouth would drop as I heard someone exclaim (as I once did), quite vehemently, that I absolutely could not do what I was about to do. I’d think, “Why would this person limit herself so violently, and then why would she try to extend that limitation to me as well?” Because, to me, it was not only obvious that my choice was possible, but that I was going to do it (in this case it was law school, the woman stated that if I was married with a child that I had missed my opportunity to go to graduate school and that I had no right to even contemplate it. Obviously, she was wrong. Limitation is a choice).

Individuals aren’t wrong for indulging in limiation, but it’s not logical to make the leap into the assumption that limitation is rational. Limitation is irrational 100% of the time. No exceptions.

Now, I’ll make a statement like that to someone in conversation and invariably, they’ll say something to the effect, “Yeah, well I want to marry Angelina Jolie, and that’s not going to happen, so I think your argument is flawed.” The only reason people make statements like that is that they’re not accustomed to understanding their own desires. The guy in question doesn’t even know Angelina Jolie, so he doesn’t really want to marry her no matter how much he’s convinced himself otherwise. He wants what she symbolizes to him. He wants to be with someone that makes him feel like he’s a success, that he’s attracted to, someone exciting, and so forth. The mix of things he’s actually wanting has nothing to do with a movie icon. In fact, saying he has to be with an Angelina Jolie is, once again, indulging in limitation.

Of course, indulging in limitation is a big part of our culture, and I catch myself doing it all the time. In fact, I write blogs to figure out ways to jar myself out of these habits. I lay the logic out to myself to see if it really works the way the world is yapping that it works. Most of the time, it doesn’t, but changing the habit is still tricky stuff.

Two Blogs in One

Samantha — Tue, 13 May 2008 20:04:00 GMT

Recently, I decided I was going to appreciate freely, without regard to what anyone else was doing. If you asked me how that’s coming along, I’d have to say that it needs work. I’ve been struggling. I wrote the following two blogs to help work out the issues. They’re really two different approaches to the same thing, so I’m including them together.

1. Chaos Theory
About two years ago, I was doing some housework, and not feeling particularly happy, when I realized that almost every motion, movement or thought I had during a day was motivated by a negative. That is, I made the bed so that the bed wouldn’t be messy. I cleaned the dishes so the kitchen wouldn’t be a disaster. I nagged my son so that he wouldn’t end up without survival skills. It was as if I was a robot. There was no me that was deciding to do anything. All of my actions were reactions. I was a puppet, doing, saying, and thinking to prevent other acts that I feared would result if I didn’t perform the particular act in question.

It seemed to me that this was no life. I’d been living variations of this no life since I was 11 years old. Not wanting to perpetrate the situation further, I decided to take my first real vacation ever. I told my family that I wasn’t going to do anything that was expected of me for two weeks. No laundry, no dishes, no cooking, no advice, no moral support, etc. It was unbelievably difficult. Not surprisingly, the very first day, I got a call from a family member who was upset about a pretty serious situation and who, in my estimation, “needed help.” I was immersed in guilt at the mere thought of not offering moral support. So I got involved and offered the support.

Like an addict, after I’d offered the support, I said to myself, “No more. You’re going to go two weeks and not provide any benefit to anyone.” I wanted to find out who I was if I wasn’t providing service to other people. It was such a simple idea, but it was amazingly torturous. I felt like I was a horrible person. I felt that I was a burden to my family. I felt that I wasn’t pulling my weight. I felt that I had no right to take a vacation and even less right to be happy because I hadn’t earned the right. Changing those kinds of associations and behaviors has been a bitch.

Two years later, I’m still working on it. To this day, even though I’ve made inroads, other people’s dramas, sorrows, and screw-ups are still more important than my own joy. I have continued to put aside my own life and well-being to help others, and sometimes this blows up in my face. I’ve finally figured out why. I’ve been running on the assumption that I’m somehow responsible for other people’s happiness. This is a pretty odd idea considering the fact that I can’t make another person happy. Only they can do that.

Underneath everything, my behavior has been motivated by the idea that I have no right to be happy and make my own independent life if someone I know is unhappy or in pain. I’m supposed to take on that pain and fix it because that’s what a good, caring person does. I’ve spent thirty years of my life doing just that, and all it has done is net me a consistent crop of frustration because there’s a never-ending stream of things that need to be fixed depending on the next decision someone makes or doesn’t make. How on earth can I be responsible for all those decisions that other people make? And where does it end? At what point do I get the whole world around me to be happy and content? I can’t. It’s not my burden. It’s not even within my abilities to perform such a feat. Furthermore, there’s an assumption in there somewhere that the person I’m helping can’t help themselves.

So I’m done. Everyone is responsible for his or her self. The truth is that everyone, without exception, is capable. I have always believed this. The only difference in my behavior is that I’m not going to spend any more time trying to convince other people of the fact. In a way, I think I’m finally growing up. I can understand now the fundamental importance of being selfish. I can’t have it both ways. I’m either putting my own well-being first, or I’m putting someone else’s well-being first. Since I can’t make decisions for other people, if I put them first, then I’m in deep water, and I don’t like deep water.

In other words, personal responsibility for others is really chaos theory. And when you no longer want the chaos, you have to put your own joy and well-being ahead of the woes of others. This doesn’t make you a bad person; it makes you an example. It’s the point I’ve been reading about for years now, and I’m finally getting it.

2. Superstition and The Rock Analogy
I think it’s interesting that the next wave in consciousness is that of emotion. Thanks to all of the wonderful Elias folks, I listened to the audio for the session on emotion, and at the end of last year, I bought the most recent Abraham book titled, “The Astonishing Power of Emotion,” which addresses to the same subject matter. More recently I endeavored to gain control of my communications and direct them. I promised myself that I would be giving appreciation out for free. And yet, even with all of this splendid guidance from myself and others, it’s been a bumpy ride. It turns out, I’m more of a trained monkey than I thought, and certain situations elicit certain reactions out of me like clock work.

When I get stuck like a skipping record, I try to parse ideas to their essentials to see what I’m really doing. I’m speaking specifically of when someone says something to you that you don’t like, and you explode, which I’ve been known to do from time to time. When that happens, I feel like I’m swimming in a murky sea, not knowing which way is up and longing to break the surface of the water into daylight.

My assumption is that the automatics are not going to get easier over time, especially heading into this next wave in consciousness, so that’s been a big motivation for me to get a handle on why I have certain reactions. From a bit of pondering and parsing, I’ve drawn this conclusion: Most of what I have felt on a daily basis has been motivated by superstition. Essentially, superstition is the belief that people, objects, behaviors, circumstances or events can give us things. In particular, that these outside events can give us feelings. For example:

Someone says that they love you, and you allow yourself to feel loved.

You make a mistake, and you allow yourself to feel incompetent.

You get a pay raise, and you allow yourself to feel successful.

You exercise, eat certain foods or take certain supplements, and you allow yourself to feel healthy.

You eat or drink certain other substances, and you allow yourself to feel bad.

Someone says something nasty to you, and you allow yourself to feel hurt.

You say something nasty to someone, and you allow yourself to feel like a bad person.

Someone you’re attracted to says that you’re gorgeous, and you allow yourself to feel beautiful.

You’re kind to someone, and you allow yourself to feel like a good person.

You receive an influx of cash, and you allow yourself to feel rich.

You get robbed, and you allow yourself to feel vulnerable.

In reality, your ability to feel anything is not dependent on any situation. You simply use those situations as triggers to induce the feeling.

The reason that each of these situations above is an example of superstition is that most people believe (read: I have believed) that the situation is causing the feeling. And yet, another person can’t make you feel anything, neither can a situation or an object because these things don’t control your feelings. You do. You’re the only one who can induce a feeling within you. You determine the triggers. Individuals have the power to induce any feeling at any time based on anything. That’s pretty amazing if you think about it.

Most people believe that it’s the situation or other individual that’s causing the feeling that they’re feeling because we’ve set up cultural norms for when it’s appropriate or inappropriate to feel a particular thing, and over time we’ve grown accustomed to viewing the situation as the cause instead of the individual who is creating the feeling. It’s an automatic response.

In a simple example, you’re not allowed to love your spouse in the same way that you have in the past when your spouse decides to leave you for someone else. That would be breaking the cultural norm that says that his or her behavior is a reflection on you. The appropriate response in cultural terms is to feel bad, and to stop loving him or her. Of course, this is tremendously limiting, and unhelpful to boot.

Underlying many automatic responses is the idea that you can add or subtract from yourself, and this forms the basis for the idea that things outside ourselves can give to us or take away from us. But really, you can’t add or subtract from yourself. What you’re actually doing when you think something is happening to you is inducing a feeling based on your associations. Most people do this automatically based on cultural norms. I think it’s time to learn to induce feelings in new ways, so I came up with this analogy to help myself out.

The Rock Analogy

We would, most of us, find it ridiculous if you placed a rock next to someone who was sitting at a table and that person was now supposed to feel good about his or her self simply because the rock was there. Or, if you want, you could use the opposite example, that it would be ridiculous if a person was supposed to feel good about his or her self if you removed the rock that was next to him or her. In either case, the rock bears no relation to the validity of the individual, so it would have no impact on how the individual felt about his or her self. The individual is neither better off as a being with the rock or without the rock sitting next to him or her. We’re not taught that good people have rocks next to them (or don’t have rocks next to them), or that well-being is dependent on a rock, so no-one is likely to feel one way or the other about his or her self when a rock is present or missing.

Replace the rock with a loved one or money or ownership or an ability or knowledge or health or companionship or beauty or understanding or a certain behavior or whatnot and we would say that it was an entirely different situation. And yet it’s not a different situation. It’s the same situation; we’re just not accustomed to viewing it that way.

Your value as a being has nothing to do with whether any particular thing is present or missing from your experience. To say otherwise is to indulge in superstition because you believe that something has power that does not have power. To cut to the chase, you have the ability to induce any feeling based on anything or nothing. In an act of enormous creativity, you can create new triggers for the way you feel. You can say that you’re going to create the feeling of total elation every time you eat breakfast. Or you can create the feeling of humor every time someone makes a comment about the news. Or you can get to the center of it all and create the feeling of pure joy for no reason at all and no matter what anyone says or does and in the face of all circumstances and events. The only reason that you may feel resistance to these types of ideas is that they’re unfamiliar, but they’re certainly options, and that’s the point.

A feeling is totally independent of circumstances. It really is. For example, you can look like hell and still feel beautiful because the feeling of beauty is not dependent on any particular form. It may not be a familiar action to divorce the feeling from the circumstances around you, but it can be done nonetheless.

Viewing yourself as less worthy when someone you respect doesn’t believe in you, for example, and then feeling bad is a conditioned response, and a pretty common one. Your behavior is no different than Pavlov’s dog. The same goes for saying that you have to have a particular body or looks or relationship or financial state for you to feel good about yourself. This is not the case. It’s the response you’ve conditioned yourself into for various reasons. That’s fine at first, to acclimatize yourself to the culture you live in, but it will only get you so far if you’re seeking satisfaction. When you want more than culture is dishing out, you have to learn to think independently. You have to train yourself into new responses.

You have the ability to say that you’ll feel good about yourself no matter what anyone says or does or thinks, no matter what the evaluation from others on your character, appearance, aptitude or a myriad of other things that we normally say have to be in alignment before we feel good about ourselves. You can condition yourself to set the feeling without reference to anything outside of yourself. In other words, you can say that the rock doesn’t matter. Whether it’s present or not is no reflection on your state of mind.

You have total control over how you feel, and you can use that power deliberately. When you do that, you’re no longer acting from superstition, and I think that’s a wonderful place to be. When you’re no longer re-acting, you’re putting power back in its rightful seat—you. And that’s a state that I’m going to arrive at sooner or later, even if I have to interrupt my behavior two hundred times a day to get there. Even if it takes decades of practice.

However, my suspicion is that setting the intent is all that’s required. The rest unfolds one notion at a time.

Seth Events: An “Out”-of-Body Experience*

Samantha — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:36:00 GMT

If you ever want to test the mettle of your relationships, try telling people that you’ve had an out-of-body experience. It’s actually quite amusing. After I had one, most of the people I told were either wary or uninterested, though most came around after a while.

The new physics says that particles appear because we believe in particles. For science, this is a good first step. The second step is realizing that the individual is those particles. When Seth or Elias or Kris say that you ARE the motions or particles you see around you as air and chairs and cars and people, they’re not kidding. This is no longer a concept for me. I know that the individual is energy. The individual is the action of the entire environment. This is not at all apparent in waking life. It’s fact nonetheless.

Now, in the past, I used to think that was bullshit. I used to think that I was my body and the couch was the couch and anyone who said differently was not in possession of their full faculties. It seemed self-evident. Experiences will change your perspective, and an “out”-of-body is a whopper of one. I now understand that the reason we all think that we’re our bodies is that we focus from that perspective with such intensity (and I mean millions of suns type of intensity). Because you’re so focused, you don’t sense your own energy as the air and the chair and the other individuals. It’s not that you are the other individuals (although in more than one respect you are), it’s that you use your own energy to perceive them. You create your own imagery of them. Now, this is probably nothing new to people who’ve been reading channeled material for an extended period of time, but I think my experience in the “out”-of-body is a little different and worth sharing for that reason.

Unlike a lot of NWVers, I’ve had very little interest in other focuses (for those of you who don’t know the language, “other focus” is a term used for a reincarnational life if you use the term in a non-linear fashion—that is, if you view these other lives as all happening simultaneously as opposed to one after the other). I’ve had no interest in “out”-of-body experiences either. I figured the dream state was a form of “out”-of-body and that we all simply block memory of the particulars because we’ve been brought up to believe that there’s no such thing as being “out” of the body. Though I’ve thought that these other types of experiences contribute to our daily lives, my attention has been elsewhere.

Instead, I’ve had an intense interest in this reality, what we call waking life, and the mechanics of it. You could call it an obsession, and that would still be an understatement. I don’t know what the deal is with me, but I have to KNOW how this reality is put together, so I’m always reading, thinking, talking and exploring. Now, I should have had a hint of what was to come from an experience I had about a month before the “out”-of-body experience, and I use the term in quotes quite purposefully. Here’s the precursor of what was to come.

Electric Energy as It Pertains to the Body

I had a dream. I was in our apartment. It looked exactly like our apartment down to the pattern of the grain on one of the wood doors. Visually, you couldn’t tell the difference between our actual apartment and this dream apartment. However, at one point, I looked at one of the walls, and I knew that I was in another environment, that I wasn’t in the waking state and that I was far, far, far from what I called waking life. I thought, “What you see around you has nothing to do with actual location,” because the imagery surrounding me looked exactly like our apartment, and yet I knew that I was at an unimaginable distance from the actual “place” I called waking life. The distance scared me a bit. Not a lot, but I was concerned.

So I tried to go “back”** to waking life. How I did it was to feel my body FROM my sleeping body. It was a very visceral kind of thing. I heard this noise like a light saber from “Star Wars” or how energy fields are portrayed in movies, a kind of buzzy,“Eyaaaeemp,” noise, and then I could feel this energy field that extended about a foot and a half outside my actual legs and feet. The rest of me felt physical, but there was a lag on my legs and feet. I thought, “What the hell? It turns out that Abraham [another channeled author] is right when they say that you’re more electrical than anything.” Then I felt a bit concerned because I didn’t know how I was going to get this electrical field back “into” my feet. But, all at once and without any effort, I was in my bed in waking life, sound as a pound, as the British say.

What I didn’t know then was that this was a test drive for the “out”-of-body I was about to experience. Here’s what happened a month later.

An “Out”-of-Body Experience

The day before the “out”-of-body happened, I’d been thinking about a Seth quote. I’d read about a dream that Rob Butts had where his dog walked through their screen door, and Rob asked Seth how this was possible. Seth replied, “Because in the dream state, desire is action.” Well, I was thinking about that quite a bit, and I thought, “The physics have to be the same in waking life. Desire is probably action, but the motion of the action is different. It would be slowed down.” This is my kind of entertainment, to think about things like this, and I thought about it off and on the whole day. Then I went to bed, and thought of it no more.

The next morning, I woke up and then fell back asleep, only I didn’t quite make it all the way into the dream state. Instead, I found myself “floating” or “permeating” my body. I woke up to this state where I was awake, but I wasn’t “attached” to the body (bear with me; I use the quotes quite deliberately because it’s a more accurate portrayal of the facts). I knew immediately that I’d given myself some kind of gift. I thought, “How did I ever manage to pull this off?” Then it was as if I began to wake up to this state. It became more real and more intense than normal, waking life.

At the time, I was staring at the wall by our bed, but when I realized that I was not “attached” to the body, and that my body had it’s eyes closed, I started to close out what I was seeing. Then I said to myself, very calmly, “You can see without physical eyes, so let yourself see,” and slowly I was seeing the wall once more.

It was fascinating to feel what I was without a physical body. I had great admiration for the very precise use by channeled authors of the term “focus,” because that’s exactly what I felt like, a focus. I was very careful to study what I was experiencing in this state. I could feel the enormous momentum that I had at my disposal. At the simplest whim, I could whip myself “out” of the area of my body.

I use the term “area of my body,” because I seemed to permeate the body as a sort of concentrated field out about two feet or so around the body. But I wasn’t content to just take that at face value, I stayed in that position and felt what that energy felt like for about an hour (though time was a bit different in that state and therefore not so easy to track). I just “hovered,” studying every little nuance I could. You see, I had no idea how I’d gotten into this position, and I didn’t know if I’d ever experience it again, so I tried to take advantage of it while I could.

This field that I could feel as a concentrated focus of my attention felt incredibly mobile. With no effort whatsoever, I felt like I could do, be, or experience anything. Staying centered where I was took enormous control. I’ll admit it, I felt rather badass that I had the presence of mind to remain where I was and to calmly examine what I was experiencing.

The longer I did it, the more I realized that my energy was not just this highly concentrated field around the body. It was also the body that I seemed to no longer be “attached” to, and it was the air and the bed and walls and everything else I call the physical environment. I thought, “Holy cow, these channeled authors are right. You actually are the entire environment.”

I think it’s easy to miss the fact that you’re not only the energy field that seems like it’s you but also the environment because the concentration is so specific that it feels like you’re the concentration exclusively. That concentration feels like a massive, massive laser beam of energy being pinpointed in one particular area, the area that we normally call the body in waking life, or what people call in an “out”-of-body their energy body or etheric body or whatnot. That intense focus of energy is not something that is separated out from everything else. It only seems that way because there’s a gigantic amount of energy being focused from a particular perspective, and that concentration has most of your attention.

The amount of energy of that focus is so enormous that it would be easy to miss the much lesser concentration of energy that is the actual body and air and room, etc. in waking life, and that is the imagery of dream environments in the dream state and that is the imagery of “out”-of-body environments in those states. It’s your own energy that creates all of it, and in that sense you are all of it.

I kept asking myself as I hovered there in that condition, “What am I?” I was trying to figure out what I called “me” in that state. I was trying to find words to describe myself, and this is what I came up with. I am action. The “thing” that I call me is really action and not a thing at all. This was the closest and most accurate description I could find, and even so it’s lacking.

I realized as I was “hovering” there that different states of attention come complete with different sets of knowledge. That is, you don’t add knowledge to yourself. You explore and experience knowledge that you already possess. You do this by focusing your attention, and then that underlying information becomes experienced knowledge, live knowledge. It shows up in the guise of whatever structure you happen to be focusing on. Where form is involved such as in waking life and dream environments, the information is clothed in those terms. In this other state, which was a type of objective state because I was still experiencing form, I knew more than I know in daily life, and there was no effort involved. I just knew more.

But here’s one of the weirdest parts of the whole experience. As action, as energy, as this field, as an attention, I felt like I was composed of sexual energy. That’s what the energy of my being felt like. I’m going to lose many of you here, and I don’t blame you. At one time, I would have thought such a notion beyond absurd.

Years back, I read a book called, “Think and Grow Rich,” and I thought the book made a lot of sense until I got to the section called, “Sexual Transmutation.” At that point, the author lost me completely. His premise was that you could channel sexual energy into a business venture, and the business venture would thrive. I thought he was nuts. I thought, “What happened? We were going along, and then the author lost his mind.” Well, I take it back. He knew a lot more than I did.

What I felt like as energy or action or as an individual in this other state was exactly like sexual energy. It was a “Whooooopeeeee!!!” feeling—unconcerned, cheerful, adventurous, buoyant, pleasurable, confident, trusting, and fun loving. It was a state of total connection, safety, belonging, and humor.

In this other state, I felt more me than I’ve ever felt in waking life. And yet, I had great admiration for physical life, and a little humor about it as well. In that other state, it was the height of hilarity that anyone would attach value judgments of good or bad to their form or their experience. It was crystal clear that all experiences were equally valuable. It didn’t matter what you looked like or what you experienced. It was all great, and I thought that it was very funny that anyone thought otherwise. At the same time, I didn’t worry about the fact that anyone thought otherwise. I had this absolute certainty that all experiences are equally useful.

My ideas about death changed for me radically in this other state of focus because it was clear that I was not only alive without a body, but vibrantly, pleasantly, wonderfully alive.*** It was also clear that death is very easy. I knew I could slip right out of the physical experience with a mere desire to do so. It also made me appreciate my decision to have a physical experience because this experience was not thrust upon me. It was a choice that I made moment to moment, and the choice was meaningful. The “out”-of-body state enhanced my desire to make the most out of the waking state. No matter what your experience, the physical state is a wonderful, precious opportunity to explore.

While I continued to “hover” there, I knew that my slightest desire would turn into a three-dimensional experience. I knew that all of that rhetoric that I’ve read about ask and it’s given is true in the most literal sense. You literally become your desires. Your energy transforms into the physical equivalent of the sum total of your desires and ideas. In this other state, it was instantaneous, and there were no obstacles except that you could view your own ideas as obstacles. That is, if you didn’t think you could have something, that would act as an experience where you didn’t have that particular thing. However, in the “out”-of-body I knew I could have anything because I could feel myself as the action of whatever I wanted. You could say that you’re almost the equivalent of your desires because desire is definitely an action. In waking life, you hold a lot of ideas simultaneously that might act in a way that would make you think that there are forces that oppose you. There are none. Your ideas are the key to everything.

The force, the momentum, the thrust of your being is monumental. While I was experiencing all of this, I knew that with the tiniest desire, I could be anywhere. In fact, the choices were overwhelming. At one point, I decided to leave the area of the body, but I didn’t want to see my body. With a giant, “Whoosh,” I was in a dream-like environment, “hovering” at the tops of a group of trees. Language is pretty limiting because first of all I wasn’t “hovering” because I had no body, and I was also the entire environment. What I was doing was focusing with intensity at that particular “location” amongst this imagery. The environment had a very strong “baby blocks” feeling. It was as if I could sense the presence of others who thought it was cute that I was so proud of myself, and who were encouraging me to keep exploring, all the while holding back laughter. I felt like I was mentally being patted on the head, like I was being lovingly patronized.

I didn’t know what to do with myself in this environment, but I knew I had to be careful because with the slightest desire I could get myself into trouble. Not serious trouble—more like a situation that I wasn’t competent to deal with. For instance, I could focus somewhere that was very, very far from physical life, making it so difficult to get “back” that I’d have effectively terminated that action. This wasn’t worrisome knowledge; it was an understanding of the boundaries of my skills.

In light of that, I decided to do something simple. I’d read about people merging with things, so I decided to try to merge with something. Out of no-where this bed appeared in the parking lot below me. I think that particular image appeared because I associate beds with security, so this was my way of providing a secure image to merge with. You have to understand that this environment, while having dream-like qualities, was as clear as waking life. When the bed appeared, it was as startling as it would be to have a bed appear instantly in waking life.

I want to be sure to express that in the act of merging, you don’t really merge with anything because you’re already merged with everything in every environment in which you find yourself, but the concentration of your attention is not fixed on everything. The act that we call mergence is really focusing your attention on being the thing that you haven’t yet explored. It’s bringing your attention to something you already are and exploring it.

I decided to merge with the bed. I had this faint concern that I was creating a shadow image of myself because of my habit of being physical and creating a physical body, so I wondered if I was just going to bounce right off of this bed. Since my focus was up at the top of the trees, I had to get it to the bed. I could do it two ways, by going “through” the environment or just desiring to focus as the bed. Because I have the habit of moving “through” space in physical reality, I zoomed down from the treetops to the bed and then had the rather mundane experience of merging with the bed. At that point, I thought, “That’s enough.” I felt like a hack and decided to go “back” to my body.

Once again, I knew I could move “through” space to the body or wake up by feeling for my body from the body itself (because even though I was “in” this other environment, I was still continuing with the action of creating a body—a small amount of my energy or concentration was still involved in that action). I decided to move “through” space because it was a pleasant rush. Then I woke up from my body, and that was that.

This was, hands down, the least serious experience I’ve had my whole life. Words can’t convey how fun and exhilarating it was. From that day on, I’ve thought that physical life can be just as free. It’s all in the ideas you hold.

*For me, the term “out”-of-body is a misnomer because a body isn’t a thing that you’re in or out of. It’s an action that you trigger and focus through. You focus through that perspective on an environment that you’re not separated out of. There are no separations, no “things” or “places.” What we call a “thing” or a “place” or a “body” is an action.

**Location is not a fixed thing. There are not places that individuals move to and from, in or out of. A location is an action. You generate locations by your ability to focus. You focus by deciding to turn your attention to certain ideas, intents, and desires. An idea, an intent, a desire will create a platform for experience, what we call an environment. So when an individual moves from one location to another, be it a movement in a physical setting or a dream setting or between the two, what they’re really doing is focusing from one perspective to another. The motion you feel as you move through an environment or to an environment could be viewed as the motion of your intent and ideas. In light of this, your intent and ideas are powerful things.

Distance, then, has nothing to do with moving through space. Distance is the range of your ideas. Distance has to do with the facility of your ideas, your ability to recall choices and to focus on them. In the simplest of examples, you will never travel to China if you do not focus on the idea that this is a possibility. All of the imagery associated with distance, driving to the airport, flying, driving through China itself, will not appear in your experience because your ideas do not accommodate the imagery that you call the experience. The ability to use and understand the imagination is a key part of your ability or inability to move over long “distances,” be they physical or otherwise. Even more central than the imagination is the underlying trust that you express in your own being and abilities.

***What we call dying is just a choice to discontinue the action that we call waking life. You discontinue creating all of the imagery, not just the body, and you’re no more dead than when you stop doing any action in daily life.

The Concept of Exchange of Affection

Samantha — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:51:00 GMT

In our culture, rarely is anything given without the expectation of receiving something in return. People give gifts, and expect a thank-you. People smile and expect the other person to smile back. People are nice, and they expect that same niceness to flow back to them. People love, and expect the object of that love to find them just as lovely. The thing is, everyone’s got different things going on within him or her, so it’s a near miracle when an exchange of any sort is on equal footing. The expectation of such an equal exchange is really a set-up.

I notice this especially when I’m walking. There’s a great diversity in moods and behavior in the people I pass. You have everything from the friendly to the offensive. I’ve often been like a little mirror, reflecting the energy of everyone I see, smiling when someone smiles at me, frowning as someone blows me off, angry as someone is openly aggressive, defensive as I feel criticism leveled at me. Instead of a relaxing walk by the ocean, it’s more like a roller coaster of feelings—a roller coaster over which it feels like I have no control. Of course, this isn’t true. I do have control. I haven’t exerted control because I’ve believed in exchange. It has severely limited what I’ll allow myself to experience.

It’s as if I’ve believed that I hold a bag full of appreciation, and I dole it out like gold stars, according to the situation. If people don’t behave according to my expectations, I withdraw that appreciation, and put it back in my bag. I’m behaving as if I’m punishing the other individual by withholding something valuable. The idea is that if I withhold this appreciation, the other person will suffer and change their behavior. Except that my lack of appreciation for someone doesn’t punish the other person. I’m the one who suffers because, whether someone deserves it or not, it feels good to appreciate. As I withhold that appreciation, I’m the one who feels tight and irritated. It really has nothing to do with the other person.

When you believe that life is a ledger sheet, and everything has to balance out, you’re not in control of your own happiness because someone else has to behave in a certain fashion for you to feel appreciation for him or her. I don’t like feeling so constrained. So I’ve decided that my purpose for being here is to enjoy myself, and in pursuit of that end, I’m not going to require that anyone do anything in particular for me to feel appreciation toward them. That doesn’t mean I become a doormat. If someone is doing something I don’t like, I’ll take whatever action I think I need to take, but at the same time, I’m not going to withdraw the appreciation I feel toward that person because I like that feeling of appreciating. It benefits me.

It has taken me a while to reach this conclusion. I’ve often been puzzled when I’ve loved people who don’t love me back; sometimes they haven’t even liked me back. Finally, I realized that I was viewing life as ledger sheet, and life doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, the people you love aren’t able to return your appreciation of them. Sometimes, they aren’t even close to understanding your true feelings even when such feelings are expressed in plain language. Sometimes people actively turn you into the enemy for their own purposes and despite your feelings about them. And all of this is okay . . . except when you believe, as I have, that life is supposed to be an even exchange—tit for tat. Then things get messy.

When you hold the belief that “if I think something nice about someone else, they must return that thought,” you’re going to be disappointed with most people because most people will not be able to fulfill your expectations. In practical terms, just because you love or like someone that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be able to return the feelings. That doesn’t mean that they don’t deserve your appreciation. It means that they probably can’t see it, and in light of that they’re going to have a near impossible time returning it even if they want to return it. So I figure I might as well think of my appreciation as a gift, and one that does not require a thank-you note because then I’m not left to the whim of the people I deal with on a daily basis. I’m in control of how I feel because I’m deciding instead of responding.

It’s a mighty powerful thing, I think, looking at it this way. It feels like I’m moving from the passenger’s seat to the driver’s seat, from the puppet to the puppeteer, from the reactor to the actor. From here on out, there will be no more contracts for affection. I’m giving away appreciation for free.

Money, Morality and The Habit of Wealth

Samantha — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:28:00 GMT

If you turn on the television, power is represented by money and a gun. A while back, I was taking a walk and I had an information cluster (mentioned in a previous blog) about power. It was the spontaneous knowing that the individual is power. That is, you don’t acquire power, you don’t gain power, you don’t add to your power. You are power. It’s what you are. Even when you’re living tales of great woe, it’s you who’s doing the writing of the tale. You really can’t be powerless no matter how hard you try, but you can pretend you are, and the experience will be real.

One of the greatest fictions of our culture, and one that leads many to a sense of powerlessness and distress, is the idea that money is power. To add insult to injury, people often mistake financial prowess for morality. If you pay your bills, you’re supposed to be a moral person, so the idea goes, and if you don’t you aren’t. These ideas are untrue, but they’re taken as fact. And yet they are far from fact. They are simply stories where people attribute power to things outside themselves, and then those ideas become their experience.

Most people (and I consider myself most people) forget that the entire financial structure is pretend. It’s a convenient thing, but it’s made-up. Furthermore, it’s subject to change. In fact, monetary systems change all the time and will continue to do so because they’re fiction. As ideas change, so do structures. Thus, individuals are better off not investing too much of their identity in the idea that their morality is tied to their money unless they’re comfortable with a changing state of morality.

Unfortunately, lots of people don’t see it that way. The mythology of the power of money at this particular juncture in time is rife with superstition. Money has replaced the idea that god is the great provider. That is, individuals used to look to god as the source of health, sustenance, food, clothing, safety and freedom. Now people look to money for these things. People think that if you don’t have money, then you can’t have the level of health, sustenance, food, clothing, safety and freedom that you desire. This is, of course, nonsense. Money can’t give an individual anything. It’s the individual’s belief that money can give them something that gives them something. You get as much or as little of whatever it is you believe you can have. This applies to money as it applies to all other things.

I consider myself an expert on the topic of money. I’ve had no money, then lots of money, I’ve gone bankrupt, and now I’m on my way to having plenty of money again. I’ve run the gamut of beliefs on this subject, and I’ve worked in the financial planning industry. I’ve seen a lot of people with a lot of money issues, and from it all, I’ve drawn this one conclusion: Money has nothing to do with money.

I’ve seen rich people lose it all, and poor people who lived like kings. I’ve seen millionaires who were scared stiff to spend their money, and people who spent so wantonly that they couldn’t hold any amount of cash in their pockets for a full day together. I’ve seen parents set up spendthrift trusts because of the fear of what their money would do to their children, and children of very wealthy people who gave up all comforts of their parents’ lives to live in some of the worst neighborhoods in the country and, in one case, to peddle drugs off the streets. In my opinion, money has absolutely nothing to do with wealth. It has nothing to do with quality of life. It has nothing to do with security. It has nothing to do with talent, abilities or morality. Money is like shoelaces—convenient, but just something that you use. It is really no different than any other object except that we attribute great value to it.

Money is just an object. Its value is the story we tell about it, and stories are fabrications. No one owns anything in reality. This is especially so when you come to terms with the fact that we’re living in multiple holographic universes, but it’s just as true even if you believe the universe is a singular, fixed entity. No one owns the earth or the minerals or the trees or the water or anything you see around you, including the houses and cars and clothes and machinery and so forth. That people write such declarations on little pieces of paper does not change the fact. Ownership is a game. It’s a structure designed to facilitate interaction. That’s all.

Money then is nothing more than a part of the game, a symbol meant to stand for value. The symbol itself has no power. It’s cotton bond paper with some pretty ink drawings on it or coins made from various metals or digital numbers stored on a server somewhere. The innate value of money is low. It’s symbolic power, however, is based on something else entirely. The symbolic power of money is entirely mental. It’s entirely belief-based. We give money its value by believing it has value.

That means that all the power that money wields is in the hands of each individual. Because you’re the author of your beliefs, it means that each individual is always as rich or as poor as the individual wants to believe s/he is. After all, we’re the ones who declare that things have value be it a piece of paper or a person. The individual’s ability to label things is very powerful.

In legal circles they say that the value of something is as much as someone is willing to pay for it. This applies to money as well. The value of money is as much as someone is willing to believe it’s worth. How much are you willing to believe money is worth? How much are you willing to believe you’re worth? The power rests firmly in your own hands.

Yet, even when you see the logic laid out, because of all the cultural baggage, it can be hard to remain clear on the topic. So, for those of you out there who have had a difficult time with money, here are some ideas that have helped me shake up my ideas about money.

Money is Not Wealth

Money and wealth are two different things. Here’s how I define wealth. Wealth is the feeling that you have an abundance of love, health, well-being, safety, freedom, comfort, interest, challenge, and interaction with the world at large. Wealth is a healthy respect for your own value. With wealth, no matter how much money you have in your pocket, your life will reflect abundance. You’ll have just as much of whatever it is you want, and you’ll know that you can accomplish any aim that you set your mind to accomplish, and sometimes that will mean lots of dollars and sometimes it won’t. The amount of money you have won’t matter to you if you’re wealthy because you will feel secure, as if you belong in the world. You will feel as if there is no impediment to anything you desire.

In that sense, you can’t quantify wealth with a number. Just as having a certain number of shoelaces in no way reflects the quality of your life, the amount of money you possess says nothing about your wealth. How you feel about the amount of money you have, however, says quite a bit about your wealth. The person who appreciates what s/he has is rich beyond measure.

Making Room for New Ideas About Money

It’s hard for most people to expand their ideas about money because most people have heavy value judgments associated with finances. They’re tight with their ideas, and so the ideas don’t change easily. Here are a few tricks of mine to loosen things up.

Just for one moment acknowledge the fact that even in a fixed universe, you’re not the almighty owner of anything. You’re on a lending program. Since, under those circumstances, no one owns anything, not even their own ideas and inventions (for at one time all of these things will pass on to others) then why not throw out the rules entirely and imagine that everything you see around you is yours? If you rent, imagine that you own every square inch of the house, the ground, the air, the street, the cars, even the people around you. You’ve drawn all of it into your experience and, in that sense, it is all yours. Like actors who are taught to “own the room,” you “own the universe.” This is an entertaining exercise to do as you walk or drive around, and it’s pretty easy. Very small children do it naturally. They act like the world is their oyster because they’re still in touch with how things really work.

If you want to ratchet it up a notch, try this one. I invented a game where the bank was a big, plastic, Playschool toy. So when I went in to do some banking, I imagined that all the tellers were kids, and that their pens were made of hollow yellow plastic, and that all of the tools surrounding them were similar—giant, plastic, and fake. When the tellers punched up accounts on the computer, it was like a toddler who punches the colorful buttons on a pretend computer. By the time I got to the counter and said that I wanted to cash my check, I almost felt like winking. It took the seriousness out of the endeavor. If you think about it, this is a more realistic approach to banking. After all, what’s a bank? It’s a building with some people in it who do stuff. It’s no different than when kids get together and make up games. Banking is a game. One of many financial games.

The Invisible Origin of Money & Your Invisible Value

I’ll say it again: Money is a unit of value that we’ve made up. It is a part of a larger game called “ownership.” Like any game, it can be fun. But to take the superstition out of it, you have to remember that the origin of money is invisible. It’s in the value that you, as an individual, assign it. This same logic applies to the way you value yourself, too.

If each individual creates the value of money, then you create the value of yourself in relation to money as well. You’re the one that says that you can have money or can’t have money, that you’re rich or poor, that you can have what you want or can’t have what you want. All of that labeling is invisible. It’s mental. It has nothing to do with whether you have the pieces of paper or coin or digital numbers that we associate with money. It has to do with ideas. You’re in total control of your ideas, so you don’t have to wait for money to pop into your experience to be rich. You don’t have to earn it first. You don’t have to look for it. You don’t have to plan for it. You have to do one thing only: you have to tell yourself different stories. You have to use your authoring abilities.

If a piece of paper with written numbers on it can have value or digital numbers on a server, then so can you as a physical being. You, in your human form, schlepping around the house can be, in an instant, a person that has plenty of these pieces of paper and digital numbers. All you have to do is start telling yourself that you’re a person who has lots of money. You have to practice these stories. You have practiced, for many years, telling yourself that money has value. So now use that same technique and tell yourself that you have value. Just as the value of those dollar bills and digital numbers is reflected in groceries or rent or a car payment, so too can your value as a being be reflected in more dollar bills and digital numbers.

Money isn’t really about money, you see. It’s about the ideas we attach to money. The choices are endless. Culture pushes a small slice of the infinite pie. You might want to kick back and look at more of what’s available.

For me, money is only really a worthy pursuit when it’s about true wealth. And wealth is about habits. It’s about the habit of believing that you have value. It’s about the habit of believing that you can accomplish anything you desire. It’s about the habit of believing that you’re safe and free and unobstructed. It’s about the habit of seeing your skills, abilities, and opportunities. It’s about the habit of knowing that you have interests and desires and challenges that make life interesting. The wonderful thing about habits is that you’re in total control. The habits are already present and available. It’s whether you choose to express them or not.

To sum up, money, and the institutions that cater to money, do not control you. They do not determine what you can have. They do not have power. You do. All it takes is a decision to tell your self some different stories.

Lies, Delusion, and Deception

Samantha — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:04:00 GMT

Faith, trust, high expectations, confidence, and a clear vision of the best possible scenario are all high level skills. For the most part, our culture teaches us to doubt, to protect ourselvelves, that we’re vulnerable, that life is uncertain, and that we should imagine the worst-case scenario for any given situation. If you’re on autopilot, then that’s what you express—the cultural norm. Change requires effort.

You don’t see faith. You can’t touch trust. High expectations are not tangible objects. Neither is clear vision. When you’re working in this kind of arena, you’re working in the realm of the invisible. When people get into the whole realitiy creation idea and start working with visualization, there’s often a lot of frustration because most people don’t realize that they’re working against a culture that has a lot of energy invested in the idea that anything you can’t see is not real. So why would faith help you? Why does it matter if you have clear vision or muddy vision? You can’t touch these things. They’re not real. So the logic goes.

Say you’ve read about some visualization techniques, and you’ve been struggling with money and want to use visualization to help provide for yourself in a more substantial way. You visualize yourself with the desired money and the confidence to go with it. You try to feel rich, and then you find yourself feeling anxiety instead. You wonder why you feel anxiety every time you try to employ these simple “reality creation” tools you’ve read about. It’s because, in a lot of ways, according to cultural standards, you’re being naughty. You’re pretending that you have something that you clearly do not have. Inadvertently, you believe that you’re not being realistic with your visualizations unless you know how it’s all going to come about, and most people don’t know how it’s all going to come about. In the face of that, pretending to be rich when you have nothing to show for it, not even a concrete idea about how it’s going to happen, is at best childish and at worst immoral.

We have a lot of harsh words in our culture for the act of saying that something is true when there’s no physical proof to back it up. We call this a lie. In psychological circles, it’s called delusion. A counselor might say that you’re in a state of denial. A friend might say that you’re deceiving yourself. A scientist might say that you’re engaged in quackery. A lawyer might say that you’re not facing facts. A boss might say that you’re not doing anything. A neighbor might say that you’re just daydreaming. A spouse might say that you’re out to lunch. A child might say that you’re crazy. These labels mean one thing: you can’t physically show that the thing you see in your mind is real. And yet anyone who has ever done anything has engaged this process. You must first imagine the event in your mind, believe it’s possible, and follow the impulses that lead to the actual experience of the imagined event. This applies to everything from getting a glass of water to building a skyscraper.

Some people find ways around this physical proof dilemna. Sometimes religion is a big help. One of my friends believes that Jesus will give her whatever she needs. And to the extent that she believes that Jesus will give it to her, she gets whatever it is. That’s a pretty useful tool if you ask me.

I’m amazed by the ability of anyone to give up control to that which they don’t see, whether they call it Jesus or allah or god or their higher self or a rabbit’s foot or their lucky socks or the universe or crystals or consciousness units or whatnot. It’s all the same. The belief is in place, and it really doesn’t matter which element the person believes is doing the delivering because it’s the belief itself that’s doing the delivering.

For me, it hasn’t been so easy to have faith in things that I can’t see and don’t apparently, physically, control. It has taken me years of work to believe that it was rational to think that mental processes were related to events I view outside myself. And yet, without knowing it, I’ve been practicing that elusive, invisible element called faith every moment of my life. I have faith that the mail will come each day, that the sun will rise, that my fingers will tap out these sentences. I have no proof that these things are going to happen except that I’ve seen them happen in the past. But that’s no guarantee that they’ll continue to function the way they do. I’ve simply developed faith that they work. And they do work.

I don’t think it’s such a stretch to take it a step further and say that I can also experience those things that I have not yet experienced but can imagine. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have faith that these things, too, are possible. Because clearly there’s a pattern to life, and that pattern says that you get exactly what you know you’re going to get. And just like people pratice playing the violin or swimming or their muliplication tables, knowing you can have something takes practice too. And just like doing laps in a pool will eventually reap results, so too you can reap results by engaging the process of knowing that what you want can be yours.

Faith is not something that’s taught in school, but it’s not unfamiliar either. You and I have a lot of faith in a lot of things. The trick is to learn to direct it, and that’s a high level skill. Like all high level skills, it’s not at all unreasonable to expect that to get there will take some practice. In other words, maybe with some reasonable effort, the invisible won’t be such a scary, elusive place after all. With a little practice, in fact, it can become quite comfortable and friendly. And when you see it that way, faith, trust, high expectations, confidence, and a clear vision of the best possible scenario become the norm, no matter what the rest of culture is doing.

Seth Events: Information Clusters, Telepathy and Precognition

Samantha — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 22:03:00 GMT

I have a special love of the Seth material. A lot of wonderful things have happened to me because of Jane Roberts’ work. But let me go back first.

Change happens in unlikely ways. After I had a personal meltdown and stopped working as a lawyer, I asked myself a lot of questions. I have a healthy regard for life and I wanted to know what it was all about, why I was here, and how to put myself on track. At the time, my husband had gone back to school at CSUMB (he already had a degree in biology, but was looking to learn some things he’d missed the first time around). We were living in student housing on the old Fort Ord military base. The student housing consisted of little concrete echo chambers built on sand. I’m not complaining; they had washer/dryers in each unit and a thermostat, and in comparison to where we’d been livng previously, this was the high life as far as amenities are concerned.

So I was home schooling and enjoying the magic of doing laundry whenever I wanted and asking a lot of questions about life. Then, one day, when my inlaws were visiting, my mother-in-law bought my husband a tiny book by Ernest Holmes called, “Creative Mind & Success.” I read the book, and it was like a spark that ignited a wildfire. Something about what Holmes was saying rang a long dormant feeling within me. In no time, I went from being intrigued to obsessed. My curiosity burned. I checked out Holmes’ book, “The Science of Mind,” from the library, and read it cover to cover. Then I bought my own copy and read it seven times through, marking it up and writing questions in the margins. At length, I had to throw it out, because I’d thumbed through it so many times that the binding came apart. Eventually, I bought another copy and began the process of wearing that one out.

Holmes’ thesis was pretty basic: mind is matter. But regardless of the number of times I read the book, I still didn’t know what “mind” was. It seems like a simple question. What is mind? But I didn’t get it. No matter how many words I read: intelligence, energy, awareness, god, etc. I still didn’t understand what mind was.

Then we moved to Pacific Grove, and I went through what I call “my library phase,” searching for the answer to the question: What is mind? I first read through the religious section of the library. I checked out every religious book I could get my hands on--the Bible, the Koran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Gnostic Gospels, the I-Ching, Christian Science books, Scientology books, books on the Kabbalah, books on Buddhism, books on mystics, and on and on. During this time period, which lasted about three years, it was not uncommon for me to read two books a day. I was easily reading ten hours a day, seven days a week. After the religious books, I did self-help, then philosophy, then psychology, then spiritualism, the psychic phenomena and then physics. But the day that will always stand out in my mind was the day I was perusing the shelves and this old, mustard yellow hard-bound book caught my attention. It visually popped off the shelf. The binding said, “Seth Speaks.”

I have a pretty keen legal mind. I can tell you in two seconds flat the underlying agenda in any piece of writing. As I was going through my reading phase, I looked for the substance beneath the rheoric. I was like a miner who sifts through mountains of rubble to find a gold nugget. I had to read a lot of garbage to find the precious bits. Until “Seth Speaks.” Reading that book was heaven. It was like finding a book filled with nothing but gold.

”Seth Speaks” was distorted, but the distortions were so slight as to be almost imperceptible. I couldn’t compare it to anything else I’d ever read because it was not on the same playing field. Not even what we consider to be the most brilliant minds in history could compare to the quality of this material. For a person such as myself, it was pure, unadultered joy.

Information Clusters

I went through all of the Seth books pretty quickly, and re-read them a number of times. Unlike my previous explorations, however, this was not passive learning. Very quickly, it instigated experiences with what I call information clusters. I started to get what could be thought of as prepackaged concepts. I’d be thinking about an idea, and then I’d get a concept related to that idea, but it would come all at once.

Normally, you get an idea, and new related ideas come to you that add to the original idea. With an information cluster, the process happens in the reverse. With an information cluster, all the information is already all there. You can almost feel an information cluster. There’s a density, as if the concept itself holds mass, and you can explore that mass by pulling it apart like you do when you pull the string on a ball of yarn.

I’m well equipped to deal with information clusters now. However, at the time I first started receiving them, I was appalled by some of the information. It completely upset my concept of reality and how it’s put together. Some of the information clusters were easier to take than others, the ones that were kind of vague. You know when you think you’re going to sneeze, but you can’t? Well, some of these information clusters were like that. I couldn’t quite get them all the way. These were safer for me because my understanding wasn’t completely engaged. I remember having one about the nature of time and the expression of an object in time. The idea was that the object already exists, and that, in a way, moments have to catch up to the object. That was vague. That I could handle.

What I couldn’t handle was what I call “the CD incident.” It sounds innocuous. My husband had been helping muscisians record their music at CSUMB. One day, he was in a chipper mood and decided to go to the post office and check our PO box. He came back with a CD that one of the musicians had sent him. My husband was credited with the sound production work. While he was telling me this, I had an information cluster. All at once, I knew that the reason he’d received the CD was because he’d been in a chipper mood when he’d gone to the post office. I knew that if he’d been in a cranky mood, the CD would not have been there because it would not have been sent. Whether he received the CD or not had nothing to do with the action or lack of action of another person, but rather by the state of mind of my husband at that particular moment. Because the event itself already existed in both forms: the form where the musician sent it, and the form where the musician did not send it.

That is, what I knew instantly was that events come pre-packaged with their own past and future. We trigger events by our attitudes, moods, expectations, beliefs and ideas. This all should have been intriguing, but I found it quite threatening because this information wasn’t like a whispy notion. It felt like fact and, at the time, I held very strong ideas about personal responsibility. With this new concept I was overwhelmed by the idea that I was personally responsible for everything that happened around me, and quite frankly it freaked me out. I couldn’t imagine being in a chipper mood all the time, and yet what I’d just tapped into suggested that it was my responsibility to be just that. That is, my ideas concerning personal responsibility (i.e. being a good person) obligated me, in my estimation, to be in a good mood all that time, and yet I knew that to be an impossibility. I couldn’t imagine living with the guilt of knowing that by not being in a chipper mood, I was effecting events around me in a way that I considered negative. As lame as this sounds, the whole idea was too much for me, and instead of acknowledging it and exploring it, I just shut it all down. I put up a big mental barrier, and I didn’t have any more information clusters for years.

Telepathy

But that wasn’t the end of it. Weird things started happening after I began to really get into the Seth material, chief amongst them was an increased awareness of telepathy. It started when I would be reading about a certain theme in the Seth material, and my husband would come home and tell me what he’d been thinking about that day, and it would be the same theme in a different guise. What was so extraordinary was that these themes were not things we’d ever talked about. They were things that I was just now reading. To my husband, they were new ideas that came to him during the day.

The first couple of times this happened, I tried to write it off with a, “That’s funny. What a weird coincidence.” But then it was clear, after a while, that it was a pattern, and it kept happening with more frequency. It wasn’t limited to concepts. I’d think of a type of food during the day, and my husband would come home with it. I’d think of a line from a movie, and my husband would play that particular movie later that night. This type of thing began to happen with my son too. Over time, it got to the point that I’d know things at a distance. Sometimes quite annoyingly, I would know if my husband was having a good day or a bad day or what my business partners were thinking about the business we owned. One night, my son went to an all-night outing. The all-night event started with a movie in San Jose and ended in a building located a few blocks away. I sensed that my son was nearby around 2:00 a.m., yet I had been told that they were supposed to get back at 4:00 a.m. I wondered why I was feeling like he was back already. The timing was later confirmed; they’d arrived back in town at 2:00 a.m. Things like this became more and more frequent.

These seemingly trivial events began to add up until the fact that we are mentally connected became fact to us. These days, it’s common for my son or my husband to say out loud exactly what I’m thinking or visa versa. It has gotten to the point that jokes pass between us without words and sometimes without even looking at one another. This is a whole new level of living. And I’m excited to see how it developes further.

Precognition

This has not been the extent of the impact of the Seth material. One of the areas that really opened up for me in a big way through the Seth material was the dream world. My dreams used to scare the pants off me. I didn’t remember them much, and when I did, I tried to forget them. I knew nothing about symbolic interpretation of dream imagery. A few literature classes with some tedious professors had me avoiding the word “symbolic” for most of my adult life. But then I read in the Seth material about becoming a “dream art scientist” and about the art of “inner physics,” and I was hooked. I knew I had to explore these things in a big way.

First, I taught myself to remember my dreams. If I woke up in the middle of the night (as I do quite frequently), I’d memorize the pieces of my dreams that were most clear by repeating them over and over and over again. I got good at it, and it became habit. It’s normal for me to remember, on average, three to eight dreams a night. Eventually, I learned to tell the difference between my own dream imagery and interactions with different individuals and/or states. Dreams lost their scariness, and I saw them for what they were: extremely useful tools, and an enjoyable way to spend some time (or non-time, however you want to look at it).

I think one of the things that continues to fascinate me most about the dream state is when I have precognitive dreams. I usually get them about financial issues for some reason. The one that was most startling to me was when I had a dream that I was talking to my mom about some loans that my stepfather would be dealing with (he was a loan officer). A few days later, I found myself on the phone saying, word for word, what I’d said in the dream, telling her in detail about the loans, and she spoke back to me the same words I heard her say in the dream. Not surprisingly, their experience with the loans in waking life matched the dream I’d had.

I have turned mental summersaults trying to figure out how this is possible. How could I know something before it happened? It’s not enough to hear or read the words, “all time is simultaneous.” What does that mean? How does it work? How can I use it? Because there seems to be quite a bit of validity to that statement that all time is simultaneous. My experience is such that I know for a fact that you can know something “before” it happens. So this leaves me asking, what is an event, and how is it triggered? I find after all this time that I still haven’t answered my original inquiry: What is mind? And I really don’t think I’m close to the answer yet.

But I think I’m learning that it’s not so much the shinning prize before me that I’m after. I think I’m addicted to the pursuit. I enjoy the questions. What’s out there? Or in there? I don’t know much yet, and the more I learn, the more I seem to not know. What other experience lay before me? So far, it has been a road full of things I never imagined possible. How many more unimaginable things must be in store? You never know what’s going to be the catalyst for those new experiences. It could be something as simple as printed words on a page.

Death, Funerals and Entertainment

Samantha — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:23:00 GMT

“Ed Truck is dead. And it blows.” Michael Scott, The Office

My son said to me this morning, “You know, funerals are an underused entertainment venue.” He went on to describe his own funeral in detail. It would take quite some planning. The invitations would claim: “This is a funeral you CAN’T MISS!” There would be gift bags and a eulogy that would start with, “Death is sad . . .” and then the orchestra would go into a Marx Brothers number. After a rousing speech full of puns, and a series of other absurd entertainments, his cremated ashes would explode over the city because they’d have been stuffed into fireworks.

The whole family has been talking about death and funerals because of a recent incident involving my dad. He has some trouble walking, and he fell late one night in the kitchen. When my brother and his fiancé woke up the next morning for work, they found him laying there in a pool of blood. It was your basic quintessential nightmare. After a trip to the emergency room, Dad was stitched up and recovered, but it got everyone talking. My brother, sister and I didn’t even know what to do if Dad keels before us. We’d never talked about it.

So my sister asked my dad what he wants when he dies. This is the plan. He wants to be buried a plain, pine coffin. At the funeral, which is to be outside, he wants the pine box to be set on a series of saw horses and used as a bar. We’re to have a party and do shots off the box. My dad said, “Alcohol has been a big part of my life. Everyone has to drink.” I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.

There seems to be a hands-on tradition of funerals in my family, at least for the men. My grandfather, Fleming Giles, on my mom’s side, was an Alaska fisherman. He died inconveniently in the middle of winter. The family stored his body in the cannery freezer in Seldovia while they dynamited eight feet of ice in order to bury him. My grandfather, Gus Standish, on my father’s side was delivered to a tiny cemetery in Soquel, California in the back of his own truck and buried after the family dug the grave themselves. There’s a certain irreverence and earthiness to these funerals that I like.

Nevertheless, I’ve decided that when I go, I want to be cremated. This is because I got scared off by both Forest Lawn in L.A. and the main cemetery in Paris. Both are massive, and both are exceedingly odd.

The cemetery in Paris is so big that it’s a city unto itself, but a city of unmoving folk. A friend of mine and I ate lunch there one bright, winter day and watched herds of mischievous youths dressed in black weave their way to the graffiti filled area where Jim Morrison is buried. Then there were the old women who fed the wild cats that roamed the place. It seemed like the cemetery was a second home to them. They were entirely too comfortable placing plastic dishes of cat food on the top of stone monuments—monuments that were meant to symbolize great dignity, but were now being used as cat perches.

My husband’s great uncle, Martin, was buried at Forest Lawn in southern California, another monolithic cemetary. Martin was an old world L.A. guy who knew Walt Disney and used to play basketball with John Wayne. He was a sweet, giant man with a Hitler mustache (or a Oliver Hardy mustache if you’re familiar with Laurel & Hardy) who used to make doors at a factory his father built in Burbank. My husband and I missed the funeral, but when we came to visit his widow, Louella, we decided to visit Martin’s grave. Only we couldn’t find it. We drove and drove and drove around, looking for it. Then we walked and walked and walked around, and still we couldn’t find it. What they need at Forest Lawn is a GPS tracking system for their dear, planted residents. Unfortunately, there was no such animal at the time we were there. We had to do some research, plot our plan of attack, and come back the next day after which we finally located the grave.

I say, just turn up the furnace and make some fine dirt out of me, thank you very much. Cemetaries aren’t my style.

My son agrees, but he said that if he was going to be buried, he’d be imaginative about it. Why don’t you see more coffins with shark fins and racing stripes, for example? Or why not strap the coffin to the top of the car like a surfboard instead of having it hidden away where no-one could see it? Or why not dress the pallbearders like thieves and do a gag where they race away with the coffin? Death, it seemed to both of us, was entirely too serious. I’m not saying we don’t grieve when one of us decides to stop playing the game, but it doesn’t have to be as dark and gloomy as we make it out to be.

It’s not that I’ve always had a lighthearted attitude toward death. I used to be pretty dour about the whole affair. But then, about a year ago, I had an out of body experience, and once you experience something like that, everything changes. Or at least it did for me. It’s hard to go along with the idea that death is this hideous event when you know what comes after it. Once you’ve been out of the body, you can’t pretend that you ARE the body. You can’t pretend that life ends at death. The experience taught me that physical life is a gift you give yourself, that it’s purposeful, and that you’re a fool not to take it for a test spin. You take it for a test spin by squeezing as much experience, challenge, love, joy, laughter and fun out of it.

I think that in the future, we may see a lot more celebrating and a lot less mourning when one of the players we love checks out of the game. Because life continues on for them. And for those of us who continue on here, each moment is valuable. Those who transition to the next game know this. They want us to play this one to the fullest extent of our abilities. That’s why we’re here.

So maybe my son is right. Maybe funerals are an underused entertainment venue. Maybe his generation is going to use funerals as an excuse to celebrate life and the living of it. All I know is that I don’t want anyone to miss me when I’m gone. When I bow out, I hope that those that I love continue to have a grand old time, playing the game. Because I know one thing for certain. I’m going to be having a great time on my next adventure. So I wouldn’t want anyone to use me as their excuse not to enjoy this one.

Absolutely

Samantha — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 19:31:00 GMT

One of my favorite quotes is by Elias. It goes like this: “There are no absolutes.” You have to love that line. It’s fodder for a lifetime of thought.

An absolute is often defined as something perfect or complete or unlimited by exception or not to be doubted. I define an absolute as something that’s considered fixed. People often think gravity is an absolute, for example (even though there are countless examples of how gravity fluctuates).

When I was in high school, I learned the famous equation E=MC squared, and as it was explained to me I knew instinctively that the equation was incorrect. I knew nothing about physics at the time. I wasn’t a big math or science person, and yet I knew to the center of my bones that the equation was flawed because if time is relative then so must light be. If it’s a perceptual universe, in other words, then that which is perceived is relative, including light. So, to me, the equation could only work as a sort of shorthand, if you amended it to say E=MC(P) squared. The “P” in the equation would stand for “pretend.” Energy equals matter times a pretend constant squared. That is, you say right up front that you’re pretending that light is a constant and not assuming it’s thus. I never said anything to my teacher about my feelings because I had no idea where my own ideas were coming from and how to validate them, and really I had no interest in delving into the matter (no pun intended). But I think what I was experiencing was an intuitve knowing that there are no absolutes. I still feel this today. The world is quite stable, but not nearly as fixed as we believe it to be.

Like many NWVers, I like to think about ideas, and the idea that there are no absolutes is a whopper. If there are no absolutes, then I can sit in my livingroom and be across the street at the same time. If there are no absolutes, then I am you. If there are no absolutes, then I can have nothing when I have everything and have everything when I have nothing. It’s pretty heady stuff, this idea that there are no absolutes, and I’m always trying to figure out the mechanics of it while trying to live the idea at the same time.

When I get into a concept, I’ll often have an experience that throws some light on the idea. It’s these innocuous experiences that are like dots that you begin to connect to form another view of reality. Here’s one of mine about no absolues.

There’s this walking path by the ocean where I live. I often stroll it, looking very serious and unfriendly as I furrow my brow and think. Well, one of the things I enjoy most about this trail, besides the water and the animals and the kids and whatnot, is the trees. I love trees, especially the Monterey Cyprus and the Redwoods. Unfortunatley, I’ve had this odd feeling of protection toward them because I haven’t quite worked my way through the idea of vulnerability yet (though I’m getting there). I’ve noticed that there’s a connection between this feeling of protection and the trees being cut down. I’ve made the connection. I realize this is a coincidence and, therefore, meaningful, as Kris might say.

One day I was walking along the ocean and I noticed that someone had cut down a young tree. I’d heard some of the home owners in the neighborhood joke about cutting down the trees so that they’d get a better view of the ocean, and so the first thing my suspicious mind conjured up was that some home owner had come out and cut down the tree. This was my story because I still had that feeling of protection for the trees. It was as if the trees had no protection of their own. Furthermore, the city usually puts yellow tape around their projects. There was no yellow tape around the felled tree, and so it didn’t seem to be a city project. At least that’s how I justified my tree-victim theory.

The tree sat in its sorry state, without yellow tape, for a few weeks. I thought that the lack of clean up added credence to my poor tree-victim tale because the city is pretty good about taking care of things quickly. Anyway, one day I was walking by that particular spot, looking at the felled tree, and I thought, “Well, Elias says there are no absolutes. If that’s true, then there’s a tree here.” I stopped and examined the empty space where the tree had once stood. I thought that normally, I would say that the tree was cut down, and so it was no longer there. I’d say that this was a fact, and I’d just have to live with it. But, in a universe where there are no absolutes, then I should have been able to create another tree right there in that same empty spot.

But, I thought, what if someone else had an opposing intent? Then what? I went back to thinking about the no absolutes. If I had complete control over my reality, then there should be a tree in that spot that no-one could tamper with because it would be my tree and I would align with a reality in which others had no intent to tamper with the trees. The trees would need no protection because there would be nothing threatening them.

Since I knew for a fact that if I was to think in terms of protecting the trees in the area, I might as well have called in the loggers myself to come take them down, I realized I had to somehow let go of personal control, all the while knowing that my intent would be born out. I had to enjoy the trees and know that my intent to see them grace the coast would create a version of experience that I would find fulfilling. This was a typical kind of meandering of thought that I do as I walk, and that was the end of it. I thought no more of it. I didn’t try to make it happen. I didn’t create any visuals. It was more like I was working through a formula in my head.

Except that this wasn’t the end of it. The next time I took a walk, there was a tree exactly where the old one had been. I was astounded. The felled tree, the stump, and the roots were gone. The new tree was the same type and the same height as the previous tree. The only difference was that the new tree was staked, and it was not quite as fat around as the old tree. To me, this was a small demonstration of the fact that there are no absolutes. I wanted a tree. I believed it was possible. I let go of control. I got a tree.

I think the idea that there are no absolutes is extremely tricky stuff because we’ve been taught to try to control things because we believe we don’t already control things. This makes creating new expectations about what’s possible a rather big endeavor at times. And yet, I think it’s as simple as expecting more. I often wonder how far I can take my visions, how far I can expect the best possible scenario, how far I can enjoy myself, others and the world at large. I often wonder if I can really love unconditionally and walk in the comfort of total safety and satisfaction. And then often I answer myself. Absolutely.