Launch into Your Ideal Life

If peace is really what you want, then you will choose peace. If peace mattered to you more than anything else and if you truly knew yourself to be spirit rather than a little me, you would remain nonreactive and absolutely alert when confronted with challenging people or situations. You would immediately accept the situation and thus become one with it rather than separate yourself from it. Then out of your alertness would come a response. Who you are (consciousness) not who you think you are (a small me), would be responding. It would be powerful and effective and would make no person or situation into an enemy.

The world always makes sure that you cannot fool yourself for long about who you really think you are by showing you what truly matters to you. How you react to people and situations, especially when challenges arise, is the best indicator of how deeply you know yourself. The more limited, the more narrowly egoic the view of yourself, the more you will see, focus on, and react to the egoic limitations, the unconsciousness in others. Their “faults” or what you perceive as their faults become to you their identity. This means you will see only the ego in them and thus strengthen the ego in yourself. Instead of looking “through” the ego in others, you are looking “at” the ego.

Who is looking at the ego? The ego in you.

Very unconscious people experience their own ego through its reflection in others. When you realize that what you react to in others is also in you (and sometimes only in you), you begin to become aware of your own ego. At that stage, you may also realize that you were doing to others what you thought others were doing to you. You cease seeing yourself as a victim.

You are not the ego, so when you become aware of the ego in you, it does not mean you know who you are—it means you know who you are NOT. But it is through knowing who you are not that the greatest obstacle to truly knowing yourself is removed.

Nobody can tell you who you are. It would just be another concept, so it would not change you. Who you are requires no belief. In fact, every belief is an obstacle. It does not even require your realization, since you already are who you are. But without realization, who you are does not shine forth into this world. It remains in the unmanifested which is, of course, your true home. You are then like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential.

Eckhart Tolle

“Generally speaking, the most miserable people I know are those who are obsessed with themselves; the happiest people I know are those who lose themselves in the service of others…By and large, I have come to see that if we complain about life, it is because we are thinking only of ourselves.”

Gordon B. Hinckley

"All it takes is a small, simple shift in perception and you will start a tidal wave of change in your life. You will begin to re-wire your mind, transform your body and re-connect with your soul. You can make the shift from seeing what is wrong about something, to seeing what is right. You can shift from focusing on what you don’t have, to what you do. You can shift from the energy of fear, into a space of love. The minute you change your focus and energy, the whole world around you also shifts to reflect that."

Connie Chapman

Take wrong turns. Talk to strangers. Open unmarked doors. And if you see a group of people in a field, go find out what they are doing. Do things without always knowing how they’ll turn out. You’re curious and smart and bored, and all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan. To find them, look for tiny interesting choices. And remember that you are always making up the future as you go.

Randall Munroe

1. You start out with the belief that you are a separately existing self in a world of other, separately existing things that live within a reality called space and time. Separation is the name of the game here. Almost everyone that comes to a nondual teaching is here. You heavily privilege appearances because that is all you see—separate appearances.

2. You see that what you took to be separately existing things are thoughts and sensory experiences. You see that space and time are also just thoughts, not separately existing things “out there.” You see everything is a thought, first and foremost.

3. You notice that these thoughts and sensory experiences are really just movements that come and go within an unchanging and unmoving, ever-present formless, non-conceptual awareness, and realize that your real identity is this awareness. This feels like witnessing still, however, as if there is a witness that sees everything come and go. There is still a subtle belief that awareness and the appearances within awareness are separate in some way.

At this point, you may find yourself privileging awareness over appearances. You may experience awareness as an inert unchanging space or void where movement, change, and thought (i.e., the world) begin to fall into the background more and more. You may even find yourself in a deep rest period where the mind is silent. This is great! Just don’t get stuck there. Signs that you are stuck there will be found in your words when you use awareness to deny the validity of any and all concepts (not seeing that you have made awareness into a subtle conceptual position). You essentially deny the world instead or merely seeing its illusory nature. This is where nihilism and fundamentalism can sneak in.

4. If you don’t get stuck at number 3, you start to see that the appearances are inseparable from awareness. You cannot pull one apart from the other. And the whole notion of a dividing line between awareness and what appears is seen as silly and impossible. You don’t even privilege awareness over appearances or vice versa. It’s all inseparable. And so your humanness, down to the most unique thing about you and others, is totally included. In Zen, they call this “returning to the marketplace.” In Living Realization, we borrow from the Buddhist texts that call this the “Middle Way.” Separation is no longer experienced. And movement, form, and change return. It is precisely because of the empty and temporary nature of everything that change and movement can happen. Awareness no longer seems like a transcendental substratum or background. It is the movement of life itself in all its forms. The world is seen to be made of stories. The stories no longer cause suffering, seeking, and conflict therefore they are naturally welcomed. They are the movement of awareness itself. At this point, you stop returning or referencing awareness. You live your life, free of seeking. You are fully in the world.

Thyme van den Beuken

The mainstream movement toward so-called ‘positive thinking' has left millions of people worldwide with unrealistic expectations, depressed and asking questions such as ‘why can't I just stay positive all the time?'

The solution: Instead of expecting only one-sided ‘positive thinking' it is wiser to expect more balanced thinking. This expectation is more realistic and ultimately leads to more ‘gratitude'; one of the keys to a fulfilling and meaningful life. Fulfillment is therefore the result of accomplishment based upon a balanced way of thinking and more realistic expectations. My book, ‘The Gratitude Effect', explores exactly how a balanced perspective and heartfelt gratitude leads to self-awareness, personal achievement and wealth in all areas of life. The main tenet is for people to be grateful for what they are realistically able to accomplish. In doing so they will be able to give and receive much more in turn. Balance is also involved in the way we perceive others.

The old saying, ‘if you can spot it, you've got it,' has great application and meaning. If there is something about another person that you’re having difficulty appreciating or loving, then there is the same part in you that you are having difficulty loving too. According to John Archibald Wheeler, of Advanced Studies at Princeton New Jersey, because the universe originates from a single source, everything is connected and entangled. All of us are connected and entangled and as emphasized by Aristotle, we are all reflections of each other. We become ourselves, to the degree that we make everyone else ourselves.

We develop our priorities, or values, based upon what we perceive or assume to be lacking or missing in our lives. If we think or feel that we’re lacking money, then we tend to value and seek money; if we perceive ourselves as lacking affection, then we value and seek affection; if we feel we lack friends, a nice home, or a good job, we place them higher on our value system. Whatever we most perceive as missing, we value. Then we see those that appear to have all that we feel we lack, a celebrity or a business leader, we subordinate ourselves to them and their values. Now our own true values recede into our unconscious. We are now trying to be someone else, someone we are not. Now our world is filled with ‘have tos’, ‘shoulds', and ‘ought tos' - the imperatives, instead of living congruently with our true priorities.

But we still have our own values deep inside, though now they are unconscious, though we’re attempting to act like somebody we are not. This raises a moral dilemma. If we are to create the reality we are meant to live, our desires must be true and congruent with our highest values. When we are true to and congruent with our highest values we become inspired from within and do not require motivation from without, nor are we as likely to be as envious and or as imitating. Our confidence grows and we awaken our inner, though often hidden, leader.

In relationships, we attract into our lives the things that challenge us and that we need most. When a partner's values are different, it is wise to look at how those different values still contribute to our life and how they allow us to do the things we love. Only then can we truly appreciate the one that we are with. It's about appreciating someone for who they are and discovering how their values truly serve yours. If you care enough to truly look there is a common ground. If you do not, you may end up bored or burned out and choose to move on to someone else to dance another pair of opposites with. Love involves a balance of challenge and support. When you feel more support than challenge you become infatuated. When you feel more challenge than support you become resentful. When you feel a balance of support and challenge you experience true love.

Love and wisdom

Dr. John Demartini

A Psychologist walked around a room while teaching Stress Management to an audience.

As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they'd be asked the "Half empty or Half full" question.

Instead, with a smile on her face, she inquired:

"How heavy is this glass of water?"

Answers called out ranged from 8 oz. to 20 oz.

She replied, "The absolute weight doesn't matter.

It depends on how long I hold it.

If I hold it for a minute,

it's not a problem.

If I hold it for an hour,

I'll have an ache in my arm.

If I hold it for a day,

my arm will feel numb and paralyzed.

In each case,the weight of the glass doesn't change,

But

The longer I hold it,

the heavier it becomes.

She continued,

"The Stresses and Worries in Life , are like that Glass of Water...

Think about them for a while and nothing happens.

Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt.

And

If you think about them all day long,

you will feel paralyzed –

incapable of doing anything....!!!"

Remember to put the Glass Down

Begin your day by feeling grateful. Be grateful for the bed you just slept in, the roof over your head, the carpet or floor under your feet, the running water, the soap, your shower, your toothbrush, your clothes, your shoes, the refrigerator that keeps your food cold, the car that you drive, your job, your friends. Be grateful for the stores that make it so easy to buy the things you need, the restaurants, the utilities, services, and electrical appliances that make your life effortless. Be grateful for the magazines and the books that you read. Be grateful for the chair that you sit on, and the pavement that you walk on. Be grateful for the weather, the sun, the sky, the birds, the trees, the grass, the rain, and the flowers.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

May the joy be with you,

Rhonda Byrne

Success at attaining any goal can be measured by how effectively you are able to move an idea from your conscious (imagination) to your subconscious (belief/action). That is why visualization is so important. When you visualize something in your conscious mind, your subconscious doesn’t know that it is only in your imagination. It watches the movie taking place in your thoughts and accepts that they are actually happening in that moment.

The Secret Daily Teachings

The subconscious mind is a captive audience for the movies we play in our head.

The reason visualization is so powerful is that as you create pictures in your mind of seeing yourself with what it is you want, you are generating thoughts and feelings of having it now. Visualization is simply powerfully focused thought in pictures, and it causes equally powerful feelings. When you are visualizing, you are emitting that powerful frequency out into the Universe. The law of attraction will take hold of that powerful signal and return those pictures back to you, just as you saw them in your mind.

The Secret Daily Teachings

A good story evokes powerful mental images. Combining a good story with powerful mental images and a strong emotional response is the essence of visualization. It has the power to reshape our perception of reality, and once that happens, reality conforms to that new perception.

Once you practice visualization in your life, you will see its power firsthand:

Write down your goals. Visualization starts with an idea and a crystal clear picture of what you want. Be specific.

Create a vision board. At its core, a vision board is a set of visual images that represent the story you are telling yourself about who are and what your life is like. It’s a way of getting clear on the life you want to create for yourself. To help you create a vision board, see my book, The Complete Vision Board Kit. It comes with a DVD, sample vision board and tools to help you create your vision board.

Act as if. State your goals in the present tense like you have already achieved them. One of the most important elements of creation is the ability to see yourself already in possession of the materialistic or physical state you are creating, prior to actual evidence of such.

Take action. Don’t just visualize. For a plant to grow, it’s not enough to simply plant it and wait. You have your work to do too.

Practice repetition. Look at the images on your vision board every day. Repetitiveness of vision combined with your associated emotions will develop your power to visualize and achieve your goals.

By John Assaraf

One day you may catch yourself smiling at the voice in your head, as you would smile at the antics of a child. This means that you no longer take the content of your mind all that seriously, as your sense of self does not depend on it.

Eckhart Tolle

“Ordinary can’t possibly be extraordinary without taking risk. You have to learn to be uncomfortable with being comfortable to truly reach your highest potential.”

Necole Bitchie

Take command of your thoughts because what you think about, you do bring about. If you are going about your day thinking about how much you dislike your life, your job, your relationships etc, the people you deal with will pick up on this and they may shut down to you and withhold opportunities as a result. Be present with people and remember whatever you're thinking about, becomes the reality you're projecting.

Dr John Demartini

Nobel Prize winning physicists have proven beyond doubt that the physical world is one large sea of energy that flashes into and out of being in milliseconds, over and over again.

Nothing is solid.

This is the world of Quantum Physics.

They have proven that thoughts are what put together and hold together this ever-changing energy field into the ‘objects’ that we see.

So why do we see a person instead of a flashing cluster of energy?

Think of a movie reel.

A movie is a collection of about 24 frames a second. Each frame is separated by a gap. However, because of the speed at which one frame replaces another, our eyes get cheated into thinking that we see a continuous and moving picture.

Think of television.

A TV tube is simply a tube with heaps of electrons hitting the screen in a certain way, creating the illusion of form and motion.

This is what all objects are anyway. You have 5 physical senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste).

Each of these senses has a specific spectrum (for example, a dog hears a different range of sound than you do; a snake sees a different spectrum of light than you do; and so on).

In other words, your set of senses perceives the sea of energy from a certain limited standpoint and makes up an image from that.

It is not complete, nor is it accurate. It is just an interpretation.

All of our interpretations are solely based on the ‘internal map’ of reality that we have, and not the real truth. Our ‘map’ is a result of our personal life’s collective experiences.

Our thoughts are linked to this invisible energy and they determine what the energy forms. Your thoughts literally shift the universe on a particle-by-particle basis to create your physical life.

Look around you.

Everything you see in our physical world started as an idea, an idea that grew as it was shared and expressed, until it grew enough into a physical object through a number of steps.

You literally become what you think about most.

Your life becomes what you have imagined and believed in most.

The world is literally your mirror, enabling you to experience in the physical plane what you hold as your truth … until you change it.

Quantum physics shows us that the world is not the hard and unchangeable thing it may appear to be. Instead, it is a very fluid place continuously built up using our individual and collective thoughts.

What we think is true is really an illusion, almost like a magic trick.

Fortunately we have begun to uncover the illusion and most importantly, how to change it.

What is your body made of?

Nine systems comprise the human body including Circulatory, Digestive, Endocrine, Muscular, Nervous, Reproductive, Respiratory, Skeletal, and Urinary.

What are those made up of?

Tissues and organs.

What are tissues and organs made of?

Cells.

What are cells made of?

Molecules.

What are molecules made of?

Atoms.

What are atoms made of?

Sub-atomic particles.

What are subatomic particles made of?

Energy!

You and I are pure energy-light in its most beautiful and intelligent configuration. Energy that is constantly changing beneath the surface and you control it all with your powerful mind.

You are one big stellar and powerful Human Being.

If you could see yourself under a powerful electron microscope and conduct other experiments on yourself, you would see that you are made up of a cluster of ever-changing energy in the form of electrons, neutrons, photons and so on.

So is everything else around you. Quantum physics tells us that it is the act of observing an object that causes it to be there where and how we observe it.

An object does not exist independently of its observer! So, as you can see, your observation, your attention to something, and your intention, literally creates that thing.

This is scientific and proven.

Your world is made of spirit, mind and body.

Each of those three, spirit, mind and body, has a function that is unique to it and not shared with the other. What you see with your eyes and experience with your body is the physical world, which we shall call Body. Body is an effect, created by a cause.

This cause is Thought.

Body cannot create. It can only experience and be experienced … that is its unique function.

Thought cannot experience … it can only make up, create and interpret. It needs a world of relativity (the physical world, Body) to experience itself.

Spirit is All That Is, that which gives Life to Thought and Body.

Body has no power to create, although it gives the illusion of power to do so. This illusion is the cause of much frustration. Body is purely an effect and has no power to cause or create.

John Assaraf

Guilt is an emotion involving a distorted memory of the past that arises when we unrealistically assume that we have caused ourselves, or others, more loss than gain, more drawback than benefit, more negative than positive, or more pain than pleasure. It arises when we have been unwilling to look for the equilibrating gains, benefits, positives, and pleasures in advance, which brings our lives into order. Every event has two sides, both a positive and a negative. It is our accountability to find these two sides equally with our minds. Our emotions correspondingly fluctuate with our mind's perceptions. We can become victims of personal circumstances and ill when we don't find the balance or we can achieve victory and well being when this inherent balance has been truly discovered.

Dr John Demartini

Self transformation is the only way:

I am not responsible for how you feel.

The world you live in is unique and personal to you, and whatever feelings you have in this world come only from you. All the good ones, and all the bad ones. This is the great secret of life. No-one is doing this to you. You do it to yourself through your habit of holding on to your thoughts, ideas, views and opinions and deciding how everyone and everything in the world should be in every moment.

Michael Kewley

Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside. To create and live with such an inner split is insane. The fact that everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it any less insane. If you have to, you can move fast, work fast, or even run, without projecting yourself into the future and without resisting the present.

As you move, work, run—do it totally. Enjoy the flow of energy, the high energy of that moment. Now you are no longer stressed, no longer splitting yourself in two. Just moving, running, working—and enjoying it. Or you can drop the whole thing and sit on a park bench. But when you do, watch your mind. It may say: “You should be working. You are wasting time.” Observe the mind. Smile at it.

Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else? Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body’s aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past.

Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.

Eckhart Tolle

To dwell in the here and now does not mean you never think about the past or responsibly plan for the future. The idea is simply to not allow yourself to get lost in regret about the past or worries about the future.

Thich Nhat Hanh

We habitually erect a barrier called blame that keeps us from communicating genuinely with others, and we fortify it with our concepts of who’s right and who’s wrong. We do that with the people who are closest to us and we do it with political systems, with all kinds of things that we don’t like about our associates or our society.

It is a very common, ancient, well-perfected device for trying to feel better. Blame others…Blaming is a way to protect your heart, trying to protect what is soft and open and tender in yourself. Rather than own that pain, we scramble to find some comfortable ground.

Most people think and talk about what they don’t love more than they think and talk about what they love. They give out more negativity than love, and in doing so they are inadvertently depriving themselves of all the good things in life.

Rhonda Byrne

The first prerequisite: Shut up. Be quiet. Stop debating. Stop arguing. Stop trying to prove a point. Even if someone knows something that you don’t, whether they share it with you or not, makes no difference, for you have to come up with your own truth. There’s really no one in this universe that can hand you realization on a silver platter.

The second prerequisite: You have to let go. You have to let go so completely that it becomes scary. You have to totally let go mentally. You have to stop depending on person, place or thing for your self-worth. You have to start depending on the infinite invisible, on what you cannot see, taste, touch, or smell or feel.

The third prerequisite: You must look at the world but never react to anything. You must watch your feelings and your emotions, observe them, and as they come into contact with you, you must become the witness, realizing that you are not those emotions. You are not your bad temper. You are not the depression. You are nothing that goes on in this world.

The fourth prerequisite: You must develop a tremendous humility, a stupendous humility. This is more important than anything else. If someone tells you something that you don’t like to hear you do not become upset. You do not hold it in. You let it go through you and it dissipates, for it has no energy except the energy you give it. You are responsible to yourself. If you fool yourself you’re just going to get disgusted in the end and give up all spiritual life, for you’ll say you’ve gotten nowhere, nothing has happened, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t exist. I suppose this is the reason I am with you. To tell you, “Yes, there is an invisible realm of perfection beyond this world, interpenetrating this world, that makes this world look like kindergarten”. Yet you must be able to see it yourself.

The fifth prerequisite: You have to want it so much that you don’t want it. You have to have such a strong desire to be free that all desire stops. When all desire stops there is a quietness, a stillness, that takes place within you. It is only when this stillness, this quietness, comes when you’re able to see clearly, not with your physical eyes, but with your spiritual eye, not with your little ‘I’, not with the ‘I-thought’, but with the ‘I-am’. And you will see in all directions. You will see up, you will see down, you will see sideways, you will see backwards. The only thing you will see is total perfection which is another name for pure awareness. You have to take this thing seriously and you’re not to be serious about this thing at all. You have to reject everything yet you also have to accept everything. You have to surrender and you have to realize that you are the Self.

There is something inside of you that knows how to do all this. You can help by becoming quiet, by becoming still, by not making a lot of noise, not making a big commotion. Let the world do what it will, yet you become silent and peaceful, compassionate, have humility. Just watch, look, observe, quiet the mind. ‘Be still and know that I am God’.”

Robert Adams