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  The alpha state is an incredible lightness of being. I feel lighter, and a wonderful, joyous feeling of inner goose bumps overwhelms me. As I stated earlier, at this stage for me my arms are like feathers and my head feels weightless. I then concentrate more fully on my inner vision and may elect to create a pastel-colored or pure-white screen. I feel alone, peaceful, blissful and ready to use this meditation time in any way I desire.

  WHAT TO DO WHILE MEDITATING

  Each session offers numerous opportunities to use the time in valuable ways. Your options are unlimited. You are entering the spiritual world as you elect to go within your self and discover God. This is the avenue through which miracles will begin to manifest in your physical world. I welcome this time and suggest it be treated as divine and special. Don’t let anyone degrade it or impinge upon it.

  The practice of active meditation includes presenting problems or questions for consideration. About a current life problem I often ask, “What is the lesson here?” or “How can I benefit from this situation?” For example, at one time I was experiencing some difficulties with my fourteen-year-old daughter. At issue was a boy she wanted to date, and it felt impossible to talk to her without our communication becoming mired in upset and obstinate behavior. In a meditation I asked, “What is the lesson here? How can I be of service to my daughter?” Suddenly I saw her on my inner screen. She was crying and I asked her, “What’s the matter? Let’s talk about it.”

  She responded, “I can’t talk to you about it, you’re my father, you’re from a different generation. You really don’t understand.”

  I visualized what I call my circle of truth, which is my meditation technique wherein whoever goes into the circle can speak only the truth. I placed my daughter in the circle and she told me that it was impossible for her to share with me, her father, what she was feeling. I joined her in the circle, held her hand and said, “I agree with you. You are troubled and you can’t share it with me because I am prejudiced and overly protective as your father. I am so preoccupied with you not getting hurt and getting in above your head, that I can’t truly hear what you are saying or feeling. But I do know someone you can talk to.”

  Then, in my mind, I transformed myself back closer to her age. There I was, fifteen years old, holding my daughter’s hands. I could experience in my mind everything I wore then, including the cheap after-shave lotion, the moccasins, and the Brylcreem in my hair. As a teenager I asked her to tell me what was bothering her.

  Standing in the circle of truth, she opened up, telling me, teenager to teenager, all that bothered her about her father. She related, among other things, how I couldn’t be objective and didn’t trust her to have good judgment.

  When I came out of the meditation I was crying, but felt as if I had made a breakthrough. While it was “merely” a ritual of the mind, it was truly a miracle in the making.

  Later that morning I had perhaps the most meaningful conversation with my daughter of our entire lives. I related what had taken place in my meditation. We sat holding hands, explaining to each other how we felt and vowing to share more openly what was troubling us. The situation was resolved. We hugged each other and both said the magic words, “I love you. I will try harder to hear your concerns.” I’ve included this story as an example of one of the many things you can do while meditating.

  The vehicle of meditation offers innumerable opportunities to resolve conflicts. The guidance is there within yourself. While meditating you can ask questions and receive answers. You also can go backward in your life and relive experiences and be able to see the lesson that each of those life experiences provided. You can commune with those who were once in your life and now are either in a different part of the physical world or have left this physical world. You can make contact with the divine intelligence within you and use it in dramatic new ways. You can learn to get to the heart of any illness that may be a part of your life, blessing the discomfort or disease and seeking the meaning of the illness. You also may come into contact with your healing capacity. You can discover that your mind is capable of creating chemicals that will reduce your discomfort and aid your healing. You can learn to ask for and receive the courage to make significant changes away from addictive poisons and unhealthy life-styles.

  Ultimately you will get to the point of going beyond thoughts and the activity of the mind. You will “transcend” to that unified field of consciousness where you have no mantra and no thought—this is bliss. And the glimpses of this state simply cannot be explained. They will be experienced and treasured—I promise.

  After meditating I enjoy a continuation of the experience of that incredible lightness of being. I feel centered and focused and relate to others seeing that fullness of God in them. It seems that I automatically eat better, make healthier choices, drink more water, exercise more, and feel more generous, more forgiving, less stressful and less fatigued. I really cannot emphasize enough how valuable the practice of meditation is for me.

  Recently I was asked to contribute, along with the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and almost thirty others, a personal experience of God for a book titled For the Love of God. Because meditation presently feels like my most meaningful experience of God, that is what I wrote about. Here’s a portion of what I said:

  I find God by giving myself time every day—through prayer, or meditation, or whatever you want to call it—to go into another level of consciousness. I close my eyes and breathe. I center myself and empty my mind and begin to feel the love that is there when I quiet down enough to feel. As I do this I transcend time and space, and I am in the very presence of God, and it puts me into a state of harmony and bliss that transcends anything I’ve ever known….

  How you do it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t come about in some linear fashion or by studying somebody else’s ways. The secret is in giving yourself permission to experience it first-hand, and then living whatever messages you’re getting. When you experience this, you connect in a loving way to everything in the universe.

  My technique is my own. It is not a part of any formal meditation training. It works for me and it has evolved, as will yours, from having the intention to make contact with this higher part of yourself. When you believe it is there, you will discover how. It will not match mine nor anyone else’s. It will be your very own, very personal, very effective means of going within. There are many wonderful books and guides available to assist you in the how. But at this point, you need the intention to discover it yourself.

  A SUMMARY OF THE FOURTEEN KEYS TO A MIRACLE MIND-SET

  When you have committed yourself to achieving your miracle mind-set you may find the following checklist helpful. These fourteen suggestions, which have no preferential order, are only a beginning. All of them originate with your invisible mind. They are the keys that can unlock the door to real-magic thinking in your daily life.

  1. Reserve your judgment and disbelief.

  2. Create a real-magic zone in your mind.

  3. Affirm yourself as a no-limit person.

  4. Develop a new mind-set toward the concept of intuition.

  5. Discover the secret that sits in the center and knows.

  6. Learn to learn through knowing and trusting rather than doubting and fearing.

  7. Affirm that your intention creates your reality.

  8. Experience surrender and satori.

  9. Learn to act as if the life you visualize were already here.

  10. Live according to your spiritual self first and your physical self second.

  11. Study the paradox, “You can never get enough of what you don’t want.”

  12. Ask nothing of anyone and practice unconditional acceptance.

  13. Begin to develop authentic power for yourself.

  14. Practice daily meditation.

  Once you have the inner way, the outer way will follow. The next chapters are devoted to helping you with that outer way. As you move on to the implementation of this miracle mind-set in all areas o
f your physical world, let the words of Lao-tzu in the Tao-te Ching echo in your mind:

  When you find the way

  others will find you.

  Passing by on the road

  they will be drawn to your door.

  The way that cannot be heard

  will be echoed in your voice.

  The way that cannot be seen

  will be reflected in your eyes.

  PART II

  APPLYING REAL-MAGIC AWARENESS IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE

  4

  REAL MAGIC AND YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

  … all you behold; tho’ it appears Without, it is Within; In your Imagination; of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  Although I have been talking at length about the inner journey and enormous joy that comes to you when you discover and retreat often to that inner quiet place of emptiness, where divine guidance is a part of your being, the journey still gets played out in your relationships to others who share this world with you. The true measure of how your life is going is in how you function with other people. When you are inspired in your relationships and have mastered how to live peacefully and joyfully with others, your life will be on the path that I have called purpose. In short, you will be experiencing real magic throughout your life, when your relationships are in order.

  Imagine what would be the ideal state for you in terms of how you relate to others. Do not let anything get in the way of this vision. This is your fantasy. How would you like your love relationships to be each and every day? How would you like to relate to your children? Would you like to feel loved and important, and know that those you associate with in the most important roles in your life truly feel loving toward you? Would you like to feel sexually satisfied and blissful? How about your relationships to friends and acquaintances? Would you like to see a perfect kind of give and take, mutual respect and caring? How about your relationships at work and in the business community? Would you like to see those you work for have a great trust in your abilities, and be able to garner the respect and love of those you are responsible for guiding in an employment role? And what about your relationships to everyone else in your world? The strangers you pass each day, the clerks who wait on you in a multitude of roles, the people you sit next to on airplanes and buses. What would you like all of these relationships to be like if you could wave a magic wand and decree that it would be so?

  The ability to create magical relationships in your life begins and ends with you. If you want to create miracles for yourself and truly live a fulfilled, self-actualized life, you need only accept complete responsibility for how you choose to go about relating to all of the other people with whom you share this divinely perfect planet. This, like the other areas of real magic, may require a great deal of unlearning, and a willingness to think in new and magical ways. You can have perfectly loving and fulfilling relationships with everyone in your life.

  Now here is the hard part. It has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else having to change in order for this miraculous state of affairs to materialize. Just allow this “radical” notion into your consciousness for a few moments and prepare yourself for some real magic in all of your personal relationships.

  THE MIND AS THE KEY TO YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

  In order to manifest miracles in your relationships in all areas of your life, you must redefine who you are. As you know, I’m asking you to define yourself as a spiritual being having a human experience, rather than the other way around. When you emphasize the spiritual being that you are, you know that the invisible part of your humanity, your mind, is where you process all of your experiences. How you choose to process your world determines the nature and quality of your physical world, including your relationships to all others.

  You obviously cannot become one with another human being in the physical sense. You cannot become the organism that another person is. Thus, really the only way you can have another person in your life in a relationship is in the invisible part of you that we’ll call your thoughts or your mind. Yes, your mind is where you experience others. Even though you may touch, kiss, hold and caress others in a physical way, it is your thoughts and only your thoughts about those physical activities that determine the quality of your relationships. Your mind is all you have for relating—even your physical touchings are experienced in the mind.

  Now mentally review and remind yourself of the key phrase, AS YOU THINK SO SHALL YOU BE! Since you cannot physically experience another person, you can only experience them in your mind. Conclusion: All of the other people in your life are simply thoughts in your mind. Not physical beings to you, but thoughts. Your relationships are all in how you think about the other people of your life. Your experience of all of those people is only in your mind. Your feelings about your lovers come from your thoughts. For example, they may in fact behave in ways that you find offensive. However, your relationship to them when they behave offensively is not determined by their behavior, it is determined only by how you choose to relate to that behavior. Their actions are theirs, you cannot own them, you cannot be them, you can only process them with your mind. Your partners in life, your children, your family, your business associates, strangers and even those who live elsewhere on this planet who are your brothers and sisters in a metaphysical sense, are all thoughts. When a hijacking occurs on the other side of the world, you feel something for those who are victimized. That something you feel connects you to those people—they are thoughts. But they are also in your thoughts as well. You are connected by invisible thoughts.

  The reverse is even more difficult to process. You are a physical being and an invisible being to yourself, but only a thought to everyone else you encounter in your life. Just as they are thoughts to you, you are thought to them. Your relationships are located in your invisible self, which has no boundaries, no limits, nothing to keep you from experiencing bliss in your relationships to others, other than how you use your thoughts.

  USING YOUR THOUGHTS TO CREATE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

  So now it is time for you to ask yourself the all-important question. What do you think about those people with whom you are in a relationship? Remember, what you think about is what expands, and your thoughts originate with you. If you are thinking about what is missing in the person you love, that will be your experience of that person, and will define your relationship. You will get stuck in a mode of dislike and unpleasantness.

  When someone else behaves in a certain way, do you process that behavior negatively, saying to yourself, “I hate it when she does that,” “I wish he would take better care of himself” or “I hate when he acts dumb like that in public”? A negative response results in more unpleasantness and negativity, because you can only act upon what you think about. In this scenario negativity is all that you have available to act upon.

  Rather than processing another person’s behavior in the judgmental way I have just described, you have the option to process the behavior in other ways. Remember, he or she is not creating the bad relationship; you are, by the way you choose to think. You could say, “She is on her own path and right now that is how she must react, but there are so many other outstanding qualities I love about her. Those are the things I am going to focus on. I want this relationship to be great, and if it is great in my thoughts, that will be my total experience of it.” Or, “He can only take care of himself in the way that he knows how to now. I know it is destructive to him, but I’m not going to stay centered on what I dislike. I am going to send him love in spite of his actions.”

  This may seem like a Pollyanna method for relating to others, and it may even appear to be dishonest at first, since these do not reflect your true feelings. But keep in mind, your true feelings come from your thoughts, and if you are interested in manifesting miracles for yourself, you will want to think in miraculous ways.

  Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others. You really do not define others with you
r judgments. What you are doing is defining yourself as someone who needs to judge. Others are defined by their own thoughts and subsequent actions. So what you want to do is work hard at creating the exact thoughts in your mind toward others that will match up with the kind of relationship you wish to have. Just as you become what you think about all day long, so too do your relationships become what you think about.

  Argue for your limitations in your relationships, and you will produce a limited relationship. Your objective in creating miracles in all of your relationships is to get much better at seeing the people in your life in ways that reflect the miracle you want to have happen. There is no other way.

  Remember that a central theme of this book is that the universe and all that is in it is on purpose. Your life has one big divine mission, and getting your life to purpose is crucial, because it is the only place where you can begin to manifest miracles. You must know and act as if you are fulfilling that divine necessity. And the most important message in this chapter is that so too are the relationships themselves some part of a divine necessity. Every relationship that you have.

  Before taking a look at how to create miracles in all of your various kinds of relationships, you must get the divine necessity notion firmly planted in your mind, so you can begin to act upon it habitually, and unlearn old habits that work against miracles. Your life and all the relationships within it are purposeful.