Living an Inspired Life Page 5
— When others attempt to seduce you into feeling bad, guilty, worried, fearful, or anything that isn’t of Spirit, practice stepping outside of yourself and becoming the observer to all things transitory, which is your entire physical world. Repeat sentiments such as “This isn’t mine,” “I refuse to own it,” and “I’ll not be misaligned with Spirit.” At any moment of your life, you can practice this observer technique: Just mentally step outside of your body and observe what’s trying to keep you from being inspired. Then vow to return to Spirit by repeating the above statements.
— Continually remind yourself of the physical and metaphysical truth that there’s no place anywhere in this Universe that’s devoid of Spirit. Everything and everyone is of Spirit before, during, and after manifestation into physical form. I urge you to seek this Spirit when your ego has convinced you that It’s absent. In all of your noninspired moments, practice stopping the chatter of the ego and look for the good, or a reason for what’s happening. Even in devastating natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, fires, and the like, look for the good. There’s no death from the perspective of infinity, so once you’ve removed the horror of dying from the equation, you’ll have a different perspective.
— The lost lives of others teach us all to be more in-Spirit: to be kinder, to grow in caring and compassion, creating an increased sensitivity to the oneness in the Universe. We can translate these heightened sensitivities into behavior that’s more giving and forgiving, extending assistance and cooperating with each other. You’ll discover a way of following your own instincts to be more in-Spirit and less in fear and anger.
— Die while you’re alive. Live the words of the New Testament that tell you that you’re in this world but not of it. You can be here without being attached to here by simply discarding your body identification: Imagine yourself as a decomposed energy field that’s impervious to anything not of Spirit. Envision, for example, that criticism and feelings of inadequacy are in this world and thus unable to enter your body because you’ve left it and are a translucent glob of nonparticles that’s no longer of this world.
This exercise will liberate you from so many of the problems you’ve connected to in your mind. You only have now, and even it will disappear in a flash. Welcome to the infinite world of Spirit! As H. L. Mencken, a famous journalist/satirist of a generation ago, wrote: “We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
— Work every day to tame ego’s demands. Ultimately, make it your goal to unashamedly slay your ego while you’re still in your body—it’s doomed to destruction at the moment you die and reenter the realm of reality from which you came anyway. Keep in mind that you’re not being cruel by destroying your ego, since it’s a false self to begin with.
The best way I can think of to summarize and conclude this chapter is to take you back to the opening quotation from A Course in Miracles. To me, this observation helps us understand why we’ve left our spiritual identification: “A sense of separation from God is the only lack you really need correct.”
Now let’s work on correcting that separation.
CHAPTER 4
HOW IT FEELS TO RETURN TO SPIRIT
“The aim and purpose of human life is the unitive knowledge of God.”
— ALDOUS HUXLEY
THIS MUCH SHOULD BE CLEAR BY NOW: We originated in a field of energy that has no boundaries. Before entering the world of form, we were in-Spirit—a piece of God, if you will. We began entering this physical world first as a particle, then as a cell, then as a fetus, then as an infant, and ultimately as a fully developed human being. But our ultimate purpose all along was to experience “the unitive knowledge of God,” as Huxley so beautifully puts it.
Sadly, when we began our human training, we were taught to abandon most of our spiritual identity and adopt a new one based on ego consciousness, or a sense of being separate from Spirit. In other words, we came here from a place of inspiration and intended to stay that way—unfortunately, we forgot to do so, and we ended up abandoning most of our inspiring notions in favor of a consensus of “reality” that didn’t include Spirit. We chose the false self, which is why we so inexplicably feel off-purpose.
In the West, traditional psychology hasn’t wholeheartedly embraced the existence of Atman, the godhead within humans, and our psychological and spiritual teachings don’t show us how to achieve the union of perfect yoga. (For this kind of learning, we’d have to study with a teacher of yoga or organized religion.) Now we’d like to reconnect to the world of Spirit, while at the same time not shed the familiar body we’ve worn for a lifetime. That’s where Patanjali’s teachings come in.
Patanjali was considered a saint in his lifetime, teaching sutras (the essential threads of a philosophy) that elevated human beings to their highest potential. He taught about knowing God through the practice of meditation and yoga in order to attain a point of union with the Source. He also described our ability to perform miracles—these feats involved specific spiritual aphorisms and the daily practice of yoga. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to my impression of Patanjali’s 2,300-year-old observations on inspiration.
When You Are Inspired . . .
My personal view of the six ideas presented here includes my belief in the existence of a God-consciousness within every one of us. And my purpose in the next few pages is to help you achieve this perfect union of yoga and live from this inspired perspective every day.
Here’s what Patanjali offered us more than 2,000 years ago, which is the most profound statement I’ve ever found on the significance of the role of our ultimate calling:
When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds, your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
Patanjali opens his aphorism with an observation on inspiration and follows it up with six conclusions. These six key points are the basis for this chapter, as they describe what it feels like when we return to the world of Spirit.
1. When You Are Inspired . . . All Your Thoughts Break Their Bonds
As I explained earlier, being inspired is equivalent to being back in-Spirit. Before we showed up in form, our mind and the mind of God were synonymous, which means that we were free from the bonds of the ego mind. This is simply how the world of Spirit works: It’s impossible to have limiting boundaries or self-imposed shackles placed on us. When we’re in harmony with the mind of God, we simply don’t have thoughts that tell us we can’t accomplish something—after all, our thoughts are of a higher energy.
Every desire we have has an energy-vibration component to it. When we launch that desire in the form of a thought, it generally matches up with the same energy vibration of our spiritual Source: I want to attract prosperity, I want to experience physical well-being, I want to have a peaceful relationship, I want to feel good about my life, and so on. The energy of our thoughts determines whether or not we’re living at an inspired level, so any doubt in our ability to manifest our desire or to receive spiritual guidance is vibrationally out of tune with that desire. And when this occurs, we automatically impose bonds on our mind—which most frequently assume the form of thoughts that imperil our ability to be inspired.
Returning to Spirit results in a grand sense of being in tune with our uniquely Divine purpose. Just imagine being able to go on and on for hours at a time without experiencing fatigue, hunger, thirst, or mental exhaustion, all thanks to one factor: the willingness to be back in-Spirit. I’ve personally found that when I have thoughts of being “inspired by some great purpose [or] extraordinary project,” I let go of fatigue; that is, being in-Spirit somehow eliminates thoughts that send the “I’m exhausted” signals to my body. In the middle of writing, speaking,
touring with my family, playing a tennis match, or anything that inspires me, all bonds are shattered by my mind, and fatigue is impossible.
Furthermore, matching up my desires with plans and behavior in the form of my thoughts and actions breaks down the bonds of hunger and discomfort. I’ve literally written for up to 14 hours without eating or experiencing any hunger pangs. Somehow being inspired allows my thoughts to remove any of the bonds that can serve as excuses not to do what I know I’m here to accomplish.
This observation that Patanjali made so long ago is awesome. Why not practice returning to Spirit and allowing all thoughts to be in agreement with that originating Spirit? Your thoughts will work on your body and surroundings, transforming obstacles into the fulfillment of desires.
2. When You Are Inspired . . . Your Mind Transcends Limitations
Next, imagine what it must feel like to have absolute faith—an inner knowing that it’s impossible to fail, a complete absence of doubt concerning your ability to create anything you place your attention on. I imagine that must be how God feels when preparing to create—He must have this kind of confidence about the outcome.
Well, when we’re inspired, we remember that God is always in us and we’re always in God, so we’re incapable of thinking limited thoughts. We’re transcendent; we’ve gone beyond the world of boundaries and entered a space of creative knowing. In other words, we surrender . . . we put ourselves under the guidance and control of our Purposeful Force.
I can personally vouch for this surrendering process. During my life I’ve had an unshakable faith in my ability to attract money and prosperity—even as a youngster living in foster homes, I always felt I was entitled to have wealth. I just knew there was an inexhaustible supply and that it was totally neutral, simply an energy that goes wherever it’s called to go. I don’t know why I’ve known this my entire life, but I know it even more today.
A television interviewer once asked me if I ever felt guilty about making so much from my writings and recordings. I responded, much to her surprise, “I would feel guilty, except that it’s not my fault.” When she asked what I meant, I explained that money has always come to me because I’ve always felt within me that I am money. I attract prosperity because I feel entitled to it; in fact, I feel that it’s actually a definition of me. Money has always come to me, and because it has, I direct it wherever I perceive it to be needed. It’s simply an energy system that my mind has created—it flows to me because it’s who I am. I’ve never doubted that I came from an energy field of pure unlimited abundance, and because of my unshakable faith, I’ve always acted on this prosperity consciousness. I’ve never known a moment of unemployment, through good or bad economic times.
When I was a little kid, I saw that collecting soda-pop bottles would bring in pennies and that pennies became dollars. I saw that helping ladies with their groceries, shoveling their snow, or emptying their ashes from the coal furnaces were acts of prosperity. And today, I’m still collecting pop bottles, shoveling snow, and carrying out ashes on a much larger scale. Prosperity continues to chase after me because I’m still in total harmony with my originating Spirit, which is abundance and prosperity.
A few years back, the NFL’s rushing champion of 2004, Curtis Martin of the New York Jets, was in the front row of a lecture I presented at Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. At the conclusion of the evening, this gentleman—who’s reached the pinnacle in his own profession—came up to me and pressed a piece of paper into my hand as he thanked me for the lecture.
Back in my hotel room, I realized that Mr. Martin had given me a personal check for $5,000, with no restrictions or instructions. You see, as I told the interviewer, it’s not my fault! (I matched the gift that Curtis gave to me and contributed it toward a van for a woman on Maui who’s been in a wheelchair for more than 30 years.) Indeed, when we’re inspired, we attract the abundance from that which we originated. And the mind then truly transcends every limitation.
3. When You Are Inspired . . . Your Consciousness Expands in Every Direction
Now try to imagine yourself living in a world that has no direction: There’s no north, south, east, or west; there’s no up or down; and there’s no past or future. In this world, any direction is every direction. As difficult as it is to imagine a directionless Universe, that’s exactly what the world of Spirit looks and feels like.
When we’re in-Spirit, every direction is possible for us at every moment because our consciousness happens within our mind. Now this inner world of ours, reunited with its originating essence, doesn’t think in only one direction; rather, it allows all possibilities. Our consciousness is in the absolute state of allowing—all resistance, in the form of thoughts, is nonexistent.
I’m speaking of a feeling that comes over us when we’re inspired by a “great purpose, [an] extraordinary project,” where we experience the bliss of an expanded consciousness with the unsurpassed allowing of any and all possibilities to enter into our daily life. We cease looking for answers in a directional way—they don’t come from someplace north or west of us, nor are they arriving from up above or impeded by something down below. We begin to feel the larger sense of life, what being a part of all is like once again.
Is there any place that God isn’t? And if we came from God, then mustn’t we be like God? You see, we’re already connected to everything we need when we’re inspired—what takes place is a realignment within us that allows for every thing, every event, and every person to merge in our inspirited consciousness. When we reemerge into the perfect oneness of Spirit, we view everyone we meet as an ally through our inspired way of life. We feel extraordinarily guided and attract people, events, and circumstances to join us in our inspired state because our world has transcended from the elementary cause-and-effect, birth-to-death path to all directions simultaneously. We’re living at maximum allowing, with nonexistent resistance. We’re back in-Spirit.
4. When You Are Inspired . . . You Find Yourself in a New, Great, and Wonderful World
Patanjali was so right with this conclusion—we absolutely enter into a new world when we become inspired. We feel different because we’re no longer edging God out. We’re back in vibrational alignment where limitations don’t exist and there are no bonds, and we’ve left our body and all of its boundaries to live in an expanded consciousness in our mind. We now begin to think in terms of miracles being not only possible, but actively en route. Soon we stop being surprised by all the things that are going our way and instead affirm: What is needed is on its way. The phrase We expect miracles is more than a New Age slogan, it’s how we feel when we live each day in-Spirit. We leave the world of anxiety, fear, doubt, and impossibility and enter a new, wonderful world of Spirit, where all things are possible.
In 1976, I made the choice to live in-Spirit on a full-time basis. I resigned from my professorship at St. John’s University to teach and write on a much larger stage. I knew within myself that I was finally listening in earnest to the inner voice that chose my destiny before I was conceived. I incarnated to teach self-reliance and to help our planet move to a more unified means of living in heaven on Earth, but I was here for 35 years before devoting myself exclusively to my mission.
At the age of 36, I was consumed by my writing and by telling the world about my book Your Erroneous Zones—I was filled with excitement and passion about what I was involved in. I had never felt as complete in my previous 35 years, even though I had an exciting and thoroughly satisfying career teaching and counseling. The moment I resigned from being an employee to living my dream—when I mustered up the courage to be in-Spirit—lives in my mind even today, some 30 years later. What happened from that moment on is precisely what Patanjali suggests. I found myself in a “new, great, and wonderful world.” It was as if a huge blanket had been removed from me, and breezes were allowed to refresh me at every turn I made. The world became my oyster when I shifted into the world of inspiration.
Suddenly I began receiving req
uests to appear on radio and TV shows to discuss what I believed in so passionately. The more I spoke (from what I now recognize as inspiration), the more invitations I received. Radio hosts began asking me to fill in—sometimes for six or seven hours on all-night shows, and then for a week at a time—in cities across the country. I stayed with my inspiration, loving every moment, working 18-hour days, and being willing to do whatever it took to stay in-Spirit.
Soon national shows took an interest in me, and all the while, precisely the right people showed up to teach and guide me through this process. Publicists, editors, book distributors, talent coordinators, travel agents, bankers . . . everyone who was needed kept surfacing. All I had to do was stay inspired, and “follow [my] bliss,” in the words of Joseph Campbell—it was as if a gigantic hand was pulling the right strings. Moment by moment, day by day, I was in awe of it all at the time, and I’m still in awe as I write these words many years later. Today, more than ever, I trust in Patanjali’s advice to stay in-Spirit.
This is not to say that many obstacles didn’t surface, as they continue to today. There are times when I still can’t fathom why I have to go through so many difficulties. At the age of 65 I thought I was through with heartbreak, yet I still had it coming at me. A debilitating heart attack, a personal tragedy in my private life, and serious addiction challenges within my family have all been recent occurrences. Despite all the hardships that surfaced, I’ve found that all these experiences are valuable because of the compassion, forgiveness, and kindness that I’ve developed.
These so-called negative situations have impacted my writing and speaking and have caused me to reach out to a much larger audience through public television, where I offer a positive, inspired message. My lesson has been to stay in-Spirit and step outside my body and my life circumstances to observe all that has and continues to flow to me from a perspective of detachment. It’s not about me; it’s about staying in-Spirit, knowing that all that comes my way is a Divine blessing—even the struggles.