YOUR

OWNERS MANUAL

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
RECALL AND CORRECTION .............. Chapter 1
PERCEPTION ............................. Chapter 2
MIND DYNAMICS ....................... Chapter 3
BELIEF SYSTEMS ......................... Chapter 4
LOVE ................................... Chapter 5
HOW DO I TEACH LOVE? ............. Chapter 6
GRATITUDE AND FORGIVENESS ......... Chapter 7
WHOLENESS AND HEALING ............ Chapter 8
LOVE AND ROMANCE .................. Chapter 9
PROSPERITY AND RICHES ............... Chapter 10
THE "BOTTOM LINE..................... Chapter 11

INTRODUCTION
It's regrettable that this manual was not available at the time of your production, since
much of your dissatisfaction with life might have been avoided. The following, however, is one
of the most important instructions in this manual:

DON'T LET YOUR PAST RULE YOUR CHOICES TODAY.

Many errors have been made in the past, mostly due to lack of understanding and
misguidance from loving friends who were also deprived of the benefits of an owner's manual.
Nothing can be done about these past errors except to correct the resulting distorted thinking
that is influencing your experience of right now. Another important instruction from your manual
is:

DON'T BLAME THE PAST FOR YOUR CHOICES TODAY.

We begin with a "recall and correction" of discrepancies. This may be for you as
discomforting and painful as pulling a rusty nail out of your foot, but also just as important. The
recall and correction process deals with beliefs and truths. The distinction between them is very
important. Things are not true just because you believe them. At one time it was believed that
the world was flat. But that did not make it true.

BELIEFS ARE A SUBSTITUTE FOR TRUTH.

Most concepts that you hold dear are precious to you, not because they are true, but
because you wished they were true. If while reading this you feel these beliefs are being
threatened, then you must reject anything in this manual that contradicts them and say, "I just
can't believe that's true." Not because it violates the truth, but because it violates your belief.

YOUR LIFE IS GOVERNED BY WHAT IS TRUE, BUT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF LIFE IS GOVERNED
BY WHAT YOU BELIEVE.
No matter how far you travel around the world, you will not fall off. That is the truth
and governs everyones life. But if you believe the world is flat, you may restrict your travel and
your experience of life will be quite different than that of someone who doesn't hold that belief.
Most folks drift through life never taking control of their experiences. This is easy to
understand, because the world doesn't teach you how to do that, it teaches you how to just
"cope". And taking control would also mean taking responsibility for your experiences. It is
easier to just "cope," then blame some outside power for what seems to happen to you, and
thus assume the role of a victim. The guidance you have received from the world does help you
cope with your "burdens", but does not help you control, your life experiences.
There is nothing wrong with beliefs, when your beliefs provide life experiences that
include peace, prosperity and loving relationships. But when you believe all the things you are
supposed to and experience an unhappy life, it's time to re-think what you believe. You may
not be responsible for what happens in your life and unexplainable events will randomly happen
for which you are not responsible. But there's a big difference between what is happening and
what seems to be happening (your experience).

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT SEEMS TO HAPPEN IN YOUR LIFE.

In Chapter 1, "Recall and Correction," we will examine more closely the discrepancies
between what is true and what you believe to be true.
CHECK LIST

DONT LET YOUR PAST RULE YOUR CHOICES TODAY

YOUR LIFE IS GOVERNED BY WHAT IS TRUE, BUT YOUR EXPERIENCE OF LIFE IS GOVERNED
BY WHAT YOU BELIEVE
DONT BLAME THE PAST FOR YOUR CHOICES TODAY
YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT SEEMS TO HAPPEN IN YOUR LIFE
BELIEFS ARE A SUBSITUTE FOR TRUTH

CHAPTER 1
RECALL AND CORRECTION
The first discrepancy has to do with your identity. When you ask the question, "Who am
I?", what does the "I" mean? When you say "my past, my car, my happiness," to what does
the "my" refer? And when you say, "Something happens to me," who is the "me"?
The world would have you believe that each of these questions refer to your body. One
result of this is that all your fears, dreams, goals, pleasures, and pains relate to the body. The
world would have your very purpose for life be the power, prestige, beauty, and comfort of the
body. For this owner's manual to be of value to you, you must accept this simple idea:

THERE IS MORE TO YOU THAN JUST A BODY.

We will not say that the body doesn't exist, but for now, simply consider that you are
more than just a body. So if you're not just a body, what then? You are left with three likely
options: the mind, the personality, and the soul (or spirit). Each of these words will conjure up
thoughts and feelings from the past that may induce resistance or confusion, but we must use
something.

IT IS ONLY BY EXPRESSING WHO YOU REALLY ARE THAT YOU COME TO LEARN WHO YOU
REALLYARE.
So, for now, we'll say that there is a spirit (or essence) of you that is more than your
body, more than your conscious mind, and even more than your personality. This spirit or
essence is your reality, and it merely uses your body and your mind as tools, issued at your
production, to help you develop a personality. It is as a guide to the self-realization of your true
essence that this owner's manual is intended.
We will begin talking about your mind, which has two aspects. One aspect of the mind
with which you are already familiar takes two forms, the conscious and the subconscious. We
won't get to the other aspect of mind until well into Chapter 5. It is with the subconscious that
we will begin. Everything that seems to happen in the outside world is but a reflection of what
is going on in the sub-conscious part of your mind. It is this part of mind that contains
everything that you believe to be true.

ALL DISSATISFACTION WITH YOUR LIFE CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
WHAT IS TRUE AND WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE TRUE.
The subconscious holds your deep-seated beliefs and bears the total responsibility for
your life experiences. At the time of your production, it contained the fundamental beliefs of
the whole human race, modified by time, culture, and geography. It is what caused the product
to develop as a human being first, and then with modifications reflecting ancestral traits such as
color and size. The final touches reflect recent ancestral traits that cause you to resemble your
parents and grandparents.
The other half of this aspect of mind (the conscious mind) is like your window to the
world. It provides clues to formulate what you think is true about yourself and the rest of the
world. It becomes aware of new things, and compares them with what is in the subconscious
to decide what to keep and what to reject. The resulting system of beliefs now stored in the

subconscious becomes your reference to reality. This "system of beliefs" is called your ego. It's
what you think you are. It is so powerful that if we add a comma to the statement, "what I
think I am," the secret is out:

WHAT I THINK, I AM.

The personality comes from the ancient definition of persona, meaning a mask or
disguise that actors wore during the portrayal of a character. Each actor might use several
masks, held in front of the face, one at a time, while playing different roles. So the personality
is who you pretend to be, and you usually play many roles such as mother, secretary, farmer,
lover,etc. - and, of course, perform accordingly. The discrepancy comes when you believe you
are the part you are playing. For example, you pretend that you are a human being, and
sometimes try to excuse some shortcomings in your capabilities by saying, "Well, I am only
human."
Your mind is very powerful. The positive aspect of that is obvious: it allows you to
change your life continually for the better. The down side is that your deep-seated negative
beliefs provide you with negative, unhappy, and unhealthy life experiences. The discrepancy is
that you would like to pretend that your positive mental position will generate the good and the
beautiful in your life, while the more prevalent deep-seated longings in your heart for
punishment you think you deserve, even destruction, will have no effect at all. (In psychology,
the desire for self-destruction is referred to as a death wish.)

THOUGHT IS CREATIVE!
Not the wishy-washy whimsical choices of strawberry versus chocolate, but those
thoughts (beliefs) that you have buried deep in the subconscious about what is real and
important have but one function: to manifest life experiences which help to prove that those
beliefs are right. Even if it is an erroneous thought, it has tremendous power to create. Until
you change your mind about what is real and important, your positive mental position is
hampered by a constant uphill struggle against the power of the negative beliefs engendered in
you by the world's thinking.
It is discrepancies in the mind (not "out there" in the world) which cause dissatisfaction,
and it is in the mind (not "out there" in the world) that correction is possible.
To explore the distinction between beliefs and truth, we'll begin with the age old
question: what is truth?

NO ONE KNOWS, NOR CAN ANYONE KNOW, WHAT THE TRUTH IS.
As you will learn from the chapter on perception, everything you observe is a witness for
what exists in your belief system. So take any information that you say you know is truth, then
remember that it is only something that you've been told, or you've read, and accepted into
your own belief system and called it truth. If you were born and raised on the other side of the
world, your understanding of truth would be drastically different. If, however, you think that
there are exceptions because you've seen things "with your own eyes" or "experienced them
within," the chapter on perception may help.
Humans like to consider themselves to be intelligent. Unfortunately, that somehow
equates with knowing, or being able to learn, what the truth is. We have developed many
massive institutions, the principals of which have assumed the function of determining the truth

and imparting it to their students. And upon this function, their value is based. For hundreds of
years, scientists have argued over the truth about light being a particle or a wave (theories
which totally contradict each other), only to discover that it has characteristics of both. The
truth you know about light depends upon the century in which you live. The truth about the
world being flat or round also depends upon the century in which you live.

THE TRUTH YOU KNOW ABOUT LIFE DEPENDS UPON THE CENTURY IN WHICH YOU LIVE.
The search for truth has contributed a tremendous amount of good toward what is
called the "quality of life." The discrepancy is that so much of what is the beauty of life is
distorted or totally sacrificed in the search for what we think we can find, and should be able to
find, but never will. You will benefit greatly by examining every idea that you hold dear, and
ask, "is that really the truth?" Do you just believe that it is true? Or do you just wish that it
were true?
I support you in your search for truth; it is a noble quest. Although this manual may not
reveal eternal truth for you, it can help you avoid some pitfalls in its quest. It will give you the
mechanism for understanding what you believe, why you believe it, and what effect your beliefs
have on your life.

MOST SPIRITUAL TRUTH SEEKERS ARE REALLY SEEKERS OF COMFORT.

The discrepancy is that all your efforts of searching for comfort and freedom from fear
are disguised in a righteous cloak of searching for the truth. Do you see that when you are not
clear on why you do something, whatever you accomplish will lack real value?
Many folks go from one teaching to another, from one religion to another, "searching for
the truth." But most "seekers" are not searching for truth; they are searching for comfort and
freedom from fear. They search until they find a story that makes them feel good. The one
that has a "ring of truth" really only placates their fear with a ring of comfort. They now start
following this teacher or attending that church - not because it tells them the truth, but because
it tells them what they want to hear. They hear a story that they would like to have be the
truth, and are told that it is the truth, so now they think they have "come home."

THE REAL MOTIVATION FOR MOST WHO SEEK SPIRITUAL TRUTH IS SIMPLY THAT THEIR
LIVES ARE NOT WORKING.
These "seekers" hope that some spiritual enlightenment will magically evaporate their
everyday problems. To the extent that they are distracted from their problems, or can
substitute a greater quest for them until the problems go away, it does help. This is reflected
by folks going to church during times of stress and conflict, and then returning to beer and
football as soon as their problems are solved. Another example is folks allowing themselves to
endure everyday hardships that could otherwise be resolved, prompted by the promise of a
better life in some other time and place.
Difficulties with money, relationships, health, guilt, etc. can be very painful and very
fearful. This causes some people to start looking for the "true meaning of life." They're really
looking for anything to relieve the pain and fear. However, because their search is motivated by
pain and fear, as the pain is eased to a manageable level and the fear subsides to tolerable,
they climb back into the sandbox of life, and explain their absence with a statement like, "Well,
I tried ___________, but it wasn't for me." Some folks are into such a defeatist mode that they
drop out of one new teaching after another just to prove that nothing works for them.

You may feel fairly comfortable so far, and even wonder if we'll ever address the really
difficult issues. Well, now's the time! You are faced with two unanswerable questions: why do
bad things happen to good people? And what happens (or doesn't happen) after death? This
leads some folks to religion, not for the truth, but for any answers that will reduce their fear of
the unknown.
What you now experience is a life of uncertainty made tolerable by a story. Or, more
accurately, many stories, because there are as many stories as there are religions. By
definition, religion depends upon belief (faith), not truth. Your belief in their story is essential
(and all that is required) for its survival. Their story (with many variations) describes a supreme
being who is blamed for all the unreasonable demands and suffering placed upon you by life
without him having to account for them. And (in theory) he receives the credit for all the
blessings. It should be noted however that you are less ready to give up credit for your
successes than blame for your failures.
Given that no one knows what the truth is, you might ask, "What's wrong with a story
that answers the questions about life and soothes the anxieties of death?" Even if it is just a
story, if it allows one to function reasonably well, why not? Isn't any alternative thinking just
another story? Yes, indeed. In fact those who have found the comfort they've sought in
"fundamentalist" thinking will find little value in this manual, and they might be well advised to
employ it simply as a doorstop.
One drawback to settling for ancient religious beliefs is that you then abandon the
search (however slim the possibility of finding it) for what the truth really is. An even greater
loss is that by placing the blame or credit for your life outside yourself you can truly qualify to
be a victim of what everyone else believes. One of these beliefs is that there has to be an
understandable reason for everything that happens out there in the world. Every mysterious
happening is challenged with the question, "What does it mean?"
When a person in your community lives what you call a good life, doing mostly what you
call good things, he generally enjoys what you call success and happiness. But occasionally he
falls victim to some random misfortune, bringing misery to his life.

RANDOM HAPPENINGS IN THE WORLD NEITHER WAIT FOR, NOR DEPEND UPON, HUMAN
UNDERSTANDING.
But the human mind equates belief with understanding, so you make up a belief that
attempts to answer why. Early attempts at this in the Bible refer to belief in a supreme being
wanting to punish man because maybe he wasn't as "good" as he should have been. Or maybe
it was a lesson to help develop strength and character, and now it can be seen as a blessing.
When a child was deformed or became sick, and because he was too young to have "sinned,"
the cause was attributed to, "The sins of the fathers visited on the children unto the third or
fourth generation." Other cultures have tried to explain away the unknown with stories of
reincarnation (mis-fortune caused by some behavior in a former life).
Just because things happen unexpectedly or in an unexplainably random order doesn't
mean there is no reason or cause for them. Nothing escapes the law of cause and effect.
Sometimes, an event will happen against such great odds of probability or in harmony with so
many other events in precise timing that you say "I can't believe it is just a coincidence." But
coincidence simply means occuring in the same time or place, it doesn't mean without cause.
When an event thus confounds your understanding, you decide its cause must lie
outside the laws of nature. You then compound the discrepancy by concluding that it is the
effect of a decision by a supreme being as a part of a great plan for your life which you
are not supposed to understand. Achieving a satisfying experience of life depends upon

focusing, not on the random, unexplainable happenings, but instead on your responses to them.

YOUR SEARCH FOR TRUTH CANNOT HAVE THE PURPOSE OF CHANGING WHAT HAPPENS IN
THE OUTSIDE WORLD. HOWEVER, THAT CAN BE THE RESULT.
If one of the traditional stories has not resolved your questions; and you are willing to
accept responsibility for what you experience in life, this manual can be of tremendous value.
One of the unexplainable aspects of life is what we call death. If you want to see how confused
folks are about truth, ask a number of people "What is the opposite of death?" The responge
will nearly always be "life." But the opposite of death is birth. Both are unexplainable aspects
of life. You don't fear birth, and yet because of what the world has taught you, you have
tremendous fear of death.

ALL RELIGIONS SURVIVE BECAUSE OF THE FEAR OF WHAT HAPPENS (OR DOESN'T HAPPEN)
AFTER DEATH.
Given the current understanding of life, many concepts taught in many religions are very
helpful and even necessary for living a happy, peaceful life here and now. All the churches I've
known are a great value to their community as cultural centers providing support programs,
counseling, and shelter.
But what attracts people to a religion is the promise of the good or fear of the bad that
happens after death. Each tells a story that placates mankind's deepest fears. But wait a
minute! There are hundreds of different religions and hundreds of different denominations of
some religions, all telling a somewhat different story. Why? First, because no one really knows
what happens, and second, everyone has a different form of the same deepest fear.
One story can't satisfy different fears, and anyway - you're not searching to find the
truth; you want to find comfort and freedom from fear. In the same way that children need a
bedtime story to ease their fears about giving up consciousness to the unknown of sleep, you
need a belief to soothe your anxiety about the unknown aspects of death.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN DEATH TO APPRECIATE WHAT HAPPENS IN
LIFE.
Many quest for the true meaning of life. Some of those who aren't satisfied by the
traditional fabricated teachings drift toward the esoteric, which simply means "hidden meaning."
Whatever meaning or purpose life has for you is determined solely by the meaning or purpose
you give it. What you see is what you get. How you see life cannot be more or less than what
you believe about life. This happens, of course, with the help of a lot of loving (and some not so
loving) helpers.

WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE, AND WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE TRUE, IS SOMETHING THAT YOU
HAVE MADE UP.
Most folks would like to "leave their mark" on the world; that is, to have some lasting
effect on mankind. The important people have towns and freeways named after them, and a
generation later no one can remember why. You are forced in history class to learn facts about
the world's heroes that bear little resemblance to their life. The only "mark" you will leave on
the world is the extent to which you change the world's thinking.
You will affect all of mankind throughout eternity to the degree you effectively influence

its thinking by what you believe, and therefore teach. Furthermore, the trend of human
evolution for the world will lean (ever so slightly) toward love or fear, depending upon what you
choose to teach. Some individuals will cause a tremendous shift in leaning (such as Hitler in
one direction or Jesus in another), but most people will have pitifully little effect.
Every so often someone like Freud or Darwin comes along and answers some questions
about the nature of human life, and in doing so, they push us a step above where we were
before the question was asked in the same way that the act of observing something in an
experiment influences what is being observed, arriving at a understanding about human
evolvement catapults human evolvement beyond the point which we had observed. The truth
will always stay at least one step beyond our understanding of it.
Other than the degree to which you can change the thinking of the world, when you're
gone, you're gone. The personality (who you think you are) and beliefs that you have acquired
and developed are not eternal. They change all the time, and are contained within an
electrochemical mechanism (called your brain) which neutralizes at death.

WHEN DEATH OCCURS, WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE CEASES TO EXIST IN ANY WAY THAT YOU
WOULD RECOGNIZE.
So what does and does not happen at death? Nothing. I know that this may be tough
for you to accept, and if you have a strong conviction otherwise, that's OK. But remember, that
too is only a belief. Clinging to an idea just because you hope it is true will create a lot of myths
in your life. Whether or not who you are continues in any way, other than the extent to which
you have changed the thinking of the world, no one knows. Now this may not be the way you
wished it were, but that's the way it is. There are many books written about "near-death"
experiences and some folks give workshops on what one might experience when they almost
die, as a way of proving what happens after you do die. But they never died, so they can only
tell you what might happen when you almost die.
Finally, your personality develops from birth and takes many years to reach what is
called maturity; the age at which you can say that you know what it is all about. There is a
counterpart to this called senility, judged by most a tragedy, but it is not. It's simply the
process of giving up contact with experiences, acquaintances, and beliefs in a gradual and
peaceful way. This is not to be confused with old-age diseases that take one in and out of
reality and cause much depression. As much time and tender care should be afforded our aging
loved ones for this process of giving up the world as is granted a newborn baby to develop a
personality.
CHECKLIST

THERE IS MORE TO YOU THAN JUST A BODY.

IT IS ONLY BY EXPRESSING WHO YOU REALLY ARE THAT YOU COME TO LEARN WHO YOU
REALLY ARE.
ALL DISSATISFACTION WITH YOUR LIFE CAN BE ATTRIBUTED TO THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
WHAT IS TRUE AND WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE TRUE.
MOST SPIRITUAL TRUTH SEEKERS ARE REALLY SEEKERS OF COMFORT.
THE REAL MOTIVATION FOR MOST WHO SEEK SPIRITUAL TRUTH IS SIMPLY THAT THEIR

LIVES ARE NOT WORKING.

RANDOM HAPPENINGS IN THE WORLD NEITHER WAIT FOR, NOR DEPEND UPON, HUMAN
UNDERSTANDING.
WHAT I THINK, I AM.
THOUGHT IS CREATIVE!
NO ONE KNOWS, NOR CAN ANYONE KNOW, WHAT THE TRUTH IS.
THE TRUTH YOU KNOW ABOUT LIFE DEPENDS UPON THE CENTURY IN WHICH YOU LIVE.
YOUR SEARCH FOR TRUTH CANNOT HAVE THE PURPOSE OF CHANGING WHAT HAPPENS IN
THE OUTSIDE WORLD, HOWEVER THAT CAN BE THE RESULT.
ALL RELIGIONS SURVIVE BECAUSE OF THE FEAR OF WHAT HAPPENS (OR DOESN'T HAPPEN)
AFTER DEATH.
YOU DONT HAVE TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN DEATH TO APPRECIATE WHAT HAPPENS IN
LIFE
WHEN DEATH OCCURS, WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE CEASES TO EXIST IN ANY WAY THAT YOU
WOULD RECOGNIZE.
WHO YOU THINK YOU ARE, AND WHAT YOU BELIEVE TO BE TRUE, IS SOMETHING THAT YOU
HAVE MADE UP.

CHAPTER 2
PERCEPTION
The "recall & correction" process is not over. It may never be. But we will move to some
basic concepts that would have been very helpful, had you been aware of them at the time of
your production.
Let us begin with this idea:

EVERYTHING IS NEUTRAL.
Choose any object and understand that of itself it has no meaning (or purpose) other
than the meaning that you give to it. Right now you have a book in your hands. Its meaning
(or purpose) will be determined only by you. On a very simple level, you may use it as a
doorstop or to help start a fire, and that then becomes its purpose for you. In a larger sense,
you may feel that the concepts are divinely inspired or the work of the devil, and will see in it
only those parts which support your belief. You literally choose the meaning or purpose of
every thing and every event in your life, and it becomes that for you.
Early in Genesis it says that man was given dominion over all living things, and later that
Adam went about naming everything. Whatever he named a thing, it became the name or
nature thereof. This is not something that just happened thousands of years ago; it happens
now, every day, every time your eyes fall upon an article. You decide what it is. That
determines what meaning it has for you, and therefore how you will use it, and - most
importantly - its value to you.
During my brief career as a minister, I visited with a poor family in our town. Their
small three year old boy, Greg, had only a tall five gallon milk can for a highchair. His mommy
had helped him paint and decorate it and he was very proud of it. Although for a long time it
was of great value to his dad to carry milk to the creamery, it now was precious to Greg as a
highchair.

YOU GIVE EVERYTHING ITS MEANING AND VALUE.

Each of these decisions has tremendous impact on your experience. The meaning,
purpose, and value of everything is something we'll be talking about throughout this manual.
For the first few years of your life, these meanings and values were fed to you by the people in
your world. Then there was a period in which you experienced a mixture of accepting the
world's teachings and deciding consciously for yourself the nature, meaning, and value of the
things over which you had dominion. Unfortunately, for the last 50 or 60 years of your life,
unless you change your mind about it, you will play the same old tape that was recorded when
you were very young.
Perception is not what a thing is, it is simply what you understand it to be - the meaning
and value you give to it. Nothing that you see has any meaning or value. It is just waiting
innocently for you to express your dominion over it and to decide its purpose in your life.
Effortlessly, it becomes "the nature thereof. " Perception, then, is an old recording of what the
world taught you, projected onto what you see.
Perception is also a process by which you interpret what your senses bring to your
awareness and compare it to a memory. Here's a basic law of perception:

IF YOU HADN'T BELIEVED IT, YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE SEEN IT.
Your senses only give you clues as to what is out there. Then your mind decides what
you are seeing. And you only see what you want to see (more correctly, what your mind wants
you to see).
Let's stop here for a moment, and read this paragraph out loud:
Now is the time for all
good men to come to the
the aid of their party.
If you're like most people, you didn't notice that the sentence says, "come to the the aid
of their party." Now the question is, why? Your eyes see it correctly. In fact the healthy eye
reports everything flawlessly to the brain, but the eye doesn't tell the mouth what to say - your
mind does.
First you become aware of something "out there," mostly from light or sound stimulating
your receptors (eyes and ears). However, your eyes don't tell you what is there, they merely
send an electrical impulse to the proper section of the brain for interpretation. The brain
compares the impulse with all the previously stored data and, with lightning speed the mind
says, "Here is what you are seeing."

Your mind interprets according to a process of abstracting what is seen out there, and
the result is recorded in your computer as what you see. Abstracting simply means taking from
available information only what is relevant and saying, "That's all there is." This is the first step
of distortion in perception. To experience that, stop here, close your eyes, and listen for sounds
that you might not have been aware of until you chose to concentrate on them. Now, while you
are looking at this page, become aware of all the other things in the room that your eyes can
see even though you're not looking directly at them. All those sights and sounds would be very
distracting to you while you were reading if your mind didn't abstract them out.
This function is truly helpful when you want to focus on just one person speaking next to
you in a room full of a lot of folks chattering. It may not be so helpful in a crisis situation when
it seems to lock in on the most life-threatening action, excluding all else. An example of this is
trying to tell a policeman details of an accident. A witness will often say, "I'm not sure, it all
happened so fast." Actually, it is all recorded in your subconscious, and many people can be
hypnotized and recall details such as license plate numbers.

NOTHING HAPPENS IN LIFE FASTER THAN THE MIND'S ABILITY TO GRASP IT.
The average football fan may be baffled by all the activity of 22 men in a single play, but

the coach can tell you where each man lined up, what route he took, and where he ended up
when the ball was dead. Many years ago I was an air traffic controller at Oakland airport in
California. I can remember arriving there fresh out of tower school. I was overwhelmed at the
sight of one man responsible for monitoring 18 speakers, and controlling 10 or more aircraft at
one time. But within 30 days, like most people who try it, I was able to qualify in every
position.
The sad part is that you actually have recorded in your conscious memory precious little
of what has really happened in your life. If it happened while your mind was in a crisis or
survival mode, as it is when you are having an argument, the information recorded is distorted
beyond recognition with very little relationship to the truth. Five witnesses in a court trial,
sworn to tell the truth, may tell five different stories, knowing for certain that theirs is the only
true testimony.
In the interpretation process you actually change what is reported so it will fit into a
pattern of compatibility. The information that appears to be "out there" and is presented to the
mind must be 99% compatible with what is in the mind, or the mind modifies or even rejects it
completely. You then end up with what should be, rather than what is. Your eyes saw the trick
sentence as it really was, but your mind decided what it should say, and what it should say is
what you experienced.

WHEN YOUR MIND MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN WHAT IS OR WHAT SHOULD BE, IF THERE IS A
CONFLICT, IT WILL ALWAYS REPORT WHAT SHOULD BE.
Let's do another one. This is not a trick, it is a simple test that an optometrist might
conduct to test your "blind spot." This will work for everyone.

Put your hand over your left eye, and concentrate on the dot on the left. Hold the page
about eight inches from your nose, and move it slowly away and toward you until the dot on the
right disappears. You have just found the blind spot in your right eye. Where the nerve
attaches to the back of the eye, there are no rods or cones to receive the light:

...and so there is a spot in each eye where you literally see nothing. But wait a minute! Look
around the room. You don't see any black "holes"; everything seems complete. How can that
be? Well, your mind "fills in" that space with the surrounding colors and shapes, to make your

sight appear complete as it should be, not as it really is. It's not just one eye seeing what the
other one misses. Close one eye; it's the same.
You probably know that the lens in your eye inverts the image it receives, so that an
image of a tree on the back of the eye is actually upside down and backwards.

However, very early in life your mind learns how the image should be, and mentally interprets
the visual signals so you can perceive things as they should be. This may explain why some
children have trouble with reversing the letters "b" and "d." At a university in California, tests
were conducted on a subject wearing special glasses that inverted everything so that the world
appeared upside down and backwards. Within two to three days, his mind made the necessary
corrections so that, once again, everything appeared as it should be. After taking the glasses
off, however, it took the poor guy a couple days to get back to normal once again.
I was a policeman for four years in Los Angeles as a reserve. One experience I had
illustrates what I'm talking about. Three of us were called to the scene of a crime. Each of us
took a report from a different witness. Upon returning to the station to compile our reports, we
discovered that although there were similarities, we had what appeared to be three different
crimes. It was clear to me that the crime happened not "out there," on the street, but in the
minds of the witnesses.

PERCEPTION IS NOT A FACT, BUT A REFLECTION OF THE BELIEFS OF THE PERCEIVER.

One of the benevolent functions of your mind is to keep from you those things which
totally don't fit in your belief system. The television series "Quincy" il lustrated this. In the
show's introductory sequence, a group of coroner students are standing in front of a table, upon
which lies a dead body covered with a sheet. Quincy pulls the sheet off and says, "Welcome to
the world of forensic medicine." You've seen what happens. One of the students faints, one
turns around, one throws up, and one just stands there. For each student, the scene
represented different levels of acceptability, and their minds took immediate control
of their bodies in different ways, according to what was compatible to each.
Many years ago when our oldest daughter was five months old, we flew to Colorado. I
had just received my pilot's license, and had more enthusiasm than good sense. We were
overweight with fuel and luggage at 9,500 feet, where a low-powered plane should never be,
close to the mountains. A strong downdraft forced me to make an emergency landing in a
cleared area. Everything went well until we reached the edge of a steep ravine and headed
down to sure destruction. From the moment I saw that very unacceptable scene until maybe a
minute later, I didn't perceive anything that went on. My next awareness was of the plane,
halfway down the hillside, upside down, baggage thrown everywhere, and I was standing
outside the plane with my daughter in my arms. I was never unconscious, but my mind did
not let me see what was a very unacceptable and fearful sight. You may have had a similar

experience.

YOUR MIND DOES NOT LET YOU SEE WHAT DOES NOT FIT.
I have said that your perception is a reflection of your belief. Perception is, in fact, your
belief projected out onto the world, much as a movie projector puts an image from the film onto
the screen. The discrepancy occurs when you don't like what you see and try to correct it by
erasing the screen. Something does happen out there in the world. Perception simply means
understanding or interpretation. So what you perceive or understand about what is happening
is a product of your mind taking the clues that your senses bring to it, matching it up with all
the data already stored there, selecting the pertinent and compatible portions, and presenting it
to your awareness as what is.

WHAT YOU SEE HAS ABOUT AS MUCH TO DO WITH PERCEPTION AS A CHICKEN DOES
IN THE MAKING OF AN OMELET.
In a research experiment where your career, your esteem, and your membership in the
country club are at stake, it may be safe to speculate that it would be easy to come up with the
desired results that you could publish. You might even overlook contrary evidence, and yet an
adversary might reach a totally opposite conclusion.
Sure, when you want to walk across a room, avoiding chairs, tables, and toys on the
floor, your visual input probably plays a more important role than your storehouse of judgments
about tables and chairs. But when it comes to dealing with people and understanding what is
truly happening, it's the computer in your head that calls the shots, with sometimes devastating
effects on relationships.
When a baby cries, he is trying to tell you something. He may be hungry or wet (or
worse). He doesn't know what his problem is or how to verbalize his needs, so he cries.
Mommy understands this as a cry for help or a call for love. Since mothers normally give
motherhood the purpose of being an opportunity to express love, they will do what seems
appropriate to extend love.
The baby is trying to communicate "I'm afraid," "I'm hurting," "I need help," or maybe
just "I want some attention." Now, here's the point: the baby doesn't know any other way to
say it. So he does the only thing he knows to get the attention he needs. At three months of
age, a baby's crying is both socially acceptable and easily recognized as a call for love.
As a two year old, crying may not get enough attention, so he'll try kicking and
screaming. This is still socially acceptable for a two year old, but not as easily recognized as a
call for love. As a 12 year old, his call for love (fear) may take the form of smoking pot, failing
math, or stealing. None of these is socially acceptable nor understood as a call for love.
Instead, you start seeing this kind of behavior as a call for punishment. The thief, the rapist,
and, yes, even the murderer is crying out, "I'm afraid," "I'm hurting," or "I need help," but
doesn't know how to communicate it in a socially acceptable or understandable way.
Each time you criticize, condemn, of ridicule anyone, you, too, are in a state of fear,
calling for love in the only way you know how. And when you perceive criticism, condemnation,
anger, or any form of fear as an attack instead of a call for love, you have misinterpreted what
someone was trying to tell you in the only way they know how.
If your belief system contains many doubts about your ability as a parent and if your
baby cries all night or your 12 year old is caught stealing or smoking pot, you may not see that
as a cry for help. Your defensiveness about your parenting ability may kick in, and you may
perceive it as a challenge to your authority, a massive failure on your part, a threat to your

reputation in the community, even an attack upon your OKness. You may not see it as a cry for
help, but a call for punishment. In the extreme, this results in child abuse.
What are the dynamics of our mind that make us behave the way we do? We'll take a
look at that in the next chapter.
CHECKLIST

NOTHING HAPPENS IN LIFE FASTER THAN THE MIND'S ABILITY TO GRASP IT.
WHEN YOUR MIND MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN WHAT IS OR WHAT SHOULD BE, IF THERE IS A
CONFLICT, IT WILL ALWAYS REPORT WHAT SHOULD BE.
PERCEPTION IS NOT A FACT, BUT A REFLECTION OF THE BELIEFS OF THE PERCEIVER.
EVERYTHING IS NEUTRAL.
YOU GIVE EVERYTHING ITS MEANING AND VALUE.
IF YOU HADN'T BELIEVED IT, YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE SEEN IT
YOUR MIND DOES NOT LET YOU SEE WHAT DOES NOT FIT.
WHAT YOU SEE HAS ABOUT AS MUCH TO DO WITH PERCEPTION AS A CHICKEN DOES IN THE
MAKING OF AN OMELET.

CHAPTER 3
MIND DYNAMICS
The next step is for you to become aware of how your premise about life affects the
choices you make in everyday events. Choices that you make a thou sand times a day are
mostly automatic or without much forethought. If you receive an invitation to go to a play, your
computer (your brain) reviews with lightning speed your premise about your reactions to plays,
the people inviting you, and maybe 19 other considerations. You'll respond with a joyful "Yes,
thank you very much" or "No, I don't think I can make it."

YOUR EXPERIENCE WILL VARY ACCORDING TO THE CHOICES YOU MAKE.

Let's take a more extreme example. Let's say that I'm standing on the side of a lake,
and John is standing beside me. About one hundred yards out, a friend of ours is drowning.
Neither john nor I can swim. Now I'm a logical person (my premise), and I feel bad about what
I see, but I know that if I jump in the water to try to help, we'll both drown, and that won't help
anyone. So I may seek some alternative way to help. John, on the other hand, is more
concerned with his fellow man than with logic (John's premise). When a friend is in danger, he
must help at all costs. So he jumps into the water. I may try to reason with him to stop him,
but if his will prevails, they'll both drown and I will have lost two friends. We occasionally read
accounts in the newspaper of this exact sort of thing. The point here is not who is right or
wrong; that is only one of many considerations.
There is a certain part in your brain that science has called the reticular activating
system (RAS). It's closely comparable to what you call the rational mind. In this context
"rational" does not mean reasonable; it provides you with advice that is anything but
reasonable. It is what gives you the capacity to rationalize, that is, to see things any way
necessary to fit a certain model. That model is your premise. Its law is to be faithful to what
you believe is true.
The choices you make (based on your premise) will always have the purpose of
supporting your premise, regardless of the cost. And sometimes you pay a very dear price
indeed. You'll sacrifice your peace to argue a point. You'll squander a fortune over a principle,
and you'll lay down your life for a cause. It doesn't matter what is really so, what must be
proven right is what your rational mind thinks is so.

THE SOLE PURPOSE OF THE RATIONAL MIND IS SURVIVAL OF WHAT IT THINKS IS SO (YOUR
PREMISE).
One more point to complete this picture: you have probably heard that you are a victim
of yourchoices. This simply means that whatever you experience in life will be a result of the
choices you make as life presents you with various happenings.
Here we'll make a distinction between what happens to you and your experience of it. As
you will see, they're not the same thing. If it started raining right now, that's what's happening.
You may be delighted or you may be unhappy; that's your experience of it. The experience of
the rain is a result of a conscious or unconscious choice, based on how you feel about rain right
now (your premise) made by you alone. Others may have an influence, but you make the
choice.
Your belief about rain and whether or not it should rain right now is your premise, and

will cause you to adopt an attitude over which you have complete control. The attitude or
feeling is instantaneous, automatic, and may seem out of control because of that, but it will be
in accordance with your belief about rain (premise). And you made up your beliefs, so
obviously you're in control. Our circle becomes complete when you understand that the
experience that results will always support the premise. Here's how it works:

From "Day One" of your life, your experiences determine how you see life, what you
believe about yourself, and your relationship to others and all things. You believe it to be true,
it's your premise (your belief system; your ego). When you want to do something in life, your
premise will provide you, consciously or unconsciously, with only those choices that will result in
the experience that will support your premise. When something happens in your life that
requires you to respond, again, you draw upon your premise (your belief about what is
happening) and you are provided with choices as to the appropriate response. The important
point here is this.

YOUR EGO CAN ONLYALLOW YOU TO SEE AS A POSSIBLE CHOICE THE RESPONSE THAT WILL
SUPPORT WHAT IT THINKS IS TRUE.
Your beliefs have a profound effect on how you perceive what's happening, because
they act like filters. They let some things through and block out oth ers, based on how
compatible the information is with what is already there. It works much like the filter on a
camera, designed to give you the picture you want rather than the picture that is. Similarly, the
subconscious mind that receives the perception is much like the film. It accepts completely,
without question, everything it receives as true, and spits out your fabricated picture of life in all
its glory, just as if it were real. And then it uses that as the basis for judging the reality of the
next perception.
If you believe you are alone in the world (premise), when people call to include you in
activities, you will decline for a variety of reasons (choice). Also, you will be unaware of social
groups advertised in the paper and so forth. Your conscious mind literally will not see the ads.
As a result, you'll sit at home every day, lonely (experience), which proves you are alone in the
world (original premise supported).

IF YOU ARE WONDERING WHAT YOUR PREMISE IS, JUST LOOK AT YOUR EXPERIENCES IN
LIFE.
I don't mean what happens to you, but your experience of it. If you're happy with what
you experience, great. Keep it up! It honors your right-mindedness. If, on the other hand,

that seems like a cruel thing for me to say, it merely means you have chosen in error and can
choose again. So here's where it finally starts to get better. Into the circle of
premise/choice/experience you can insert a discipline - a training that will give you another
perspective from which to measure what happens to you.

A new thought in your belief system which effectively changes your premise will provide
a whole new range of options (choices), and change the way you respond to happenings in
your life. This will, of course, result in a different experience of life. That's right - an
experience that supports your new premise, effortlessly. Where once you perceived a
grievance, you can now see a blessing. Where conflict abounded, there can be harmony.
Where hostility seemed real, you can see peace. Fear can be replaced with love.
The key word in the above paragraph is effectively. The sad part occurs when folks think
they are effecting a real life change when, in fact, the fruitless program is a trick of the ego.
Busy work gives the appearance of doing something, while really accomplishing nothing. The
result is that the core belief of which you are so proud, and must defend (though harmful to
you), is well protected. A good example of this is wishing disguised as affirmation.

AFFIRMATIONS CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH, UNLESS SOMETHING IN THE

BEDROCK OF YOUR BELIEF IS CHANGED.
Let us distinguish clearly between affirming and wishing. An affirmation is simply a
declaration of that which is really so. Affirming is not trying to manipulate the appearances that
clearly are not so.
We live on a farm and a few years ago, through a small accident, I pulled the end off a
finger. I knew it would affect my guitar playing, so in anger I grabbed my finger, closed my
eyes, and declared, "My finger is whole, my finger is whole." Did I believe it? No! And when I
opened my eyes, my unbelief was confirmed. Then I remember the affirmation, "I could see
peace instead of this." I experienced immediate release from fear and I was completely calm
while my daughter drove me to the doctor. Within six months, the finger had grown back and
my guitar playing was not affected at all; it's still as bad as ever!
When what you say is in conflict with what you believe, the positive wish expressed in
the affirmation only reinforces the negative belief which created the negative experience in your
life which motivated you to come up with an affirmation. Say what? Let's try it another way. If
you are poor (or sick, or lonely, or whatever) the part of your mind that creates your life
experiences knows that. So while you sit in front of your burning candle, eyes closed, legs
crossed, inhaling incense, chanting, "I am rich ...I am rich," your mind is saying, "Who do you
think you are kidding?" If you were rich, you wouldn't be doing this song and dance. So the
fact that you are doing it proves to your belief system that it is right, and when you open your

eyes and uncramp your legs, your perception of poverty (or sickness) is reinforced and
strengthened. The sad part is that while you think that you are doing something good and
positive in your life, it really only reinforces the negative.

AFFIRMATIONS THAT WORK ARE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF A POSITIVE MENTAL POSITION.

An effective affirmation includes three elements: it must be a principle upon which life
depends, it must separate the meaningful from the meaningless, and must be a positive
assertion.
Repeating over and over that your neighbor's husband John is really your husband is not
affirming, it's wishing. It is not a principle upon which life depends, and it is clearly not so.

A WISH IS A DECLARATION OF THE MOUTH THAT THE MIND KNOWS IS A LIE.

To repeat this kind of a lie over and over, hoping to make it so, is what Jesus called
"vain repetitions."
Since we're on this example of relationships, let's pursue it further. Can you manipulate
the world and, through thought and action, cause John and his wife to break up, then lure John
into your den and posses him? Yes, sometimes. And does that bring the peace, joy, and love
that was the root of your desire? Hardly. Try this as an affirmation for relationships:

LOVE IS PRESENT EVERYWHERE. LOVE IS THE ESSENCE OF MY REALITY. I CONSTANTLY

ATTRACT THE RIGHT PEOPLE WHO ALLOW ME TO EXPRESS AND EXPERIENCE THE LOVE
THAT I AM.
OK, let's put that to the test. Is it a principle upon which life depends? Does it separate
the meaningful from the meaningless? Is it a positive assertion? Yes! Yes! Yes! And when you
completely believe it, will it bring peace, joy, and love? You bet!
"Completely believe it" is the key issue. If repeating the above does not effectively
change your belief system (premise), you will see absolutely no change in your life experiences.
If it does, you will be flooded with changes, effortlessly. So, the words are not what's
important; the technique is not what's important. What works is what's important. Some people
find prayer effective. Science of Mind calls it Spiritual Mind Treatment. Unity calls it Master
Minding. One of the most effective tools for transformation of consciousness (change of mind)
comes from "A Course in Miracles," called the workbook, which contains 365 daily affirmations.
Let's get back to and finish up this example on relationships with a practical thought. We
all have an image of the perfect partner, but ask yourself this: "Am I the kind of person my
perfect partner would be attracted to?" As soon as your own mental image of yourself allows
you to say yes, your perfect partner will be irresistibly attracted to you.
A final thought on affirmations: some folks feel maybe it is unspiritual to use your mind
power to manipulate the world, and produce things (such as parking spaces) in your world.
Well, you can tell them that your "OWNER'S MANUAL" said that it's OK. In fact, if you are not
constantly using your mind to consciously manipulate the physical world, you really don't
understand the power of your mind. But if you think this is the key to happiness, you don't
understand the purpose of your mind.
CHECKLIST

YOUR EXPERIENCE WILL VARY ACCORDING TO THE CHOICES YOU MAKE.

THE SOLE PURPOSE OF THE RATIONAL MIND IS SURVIVAL OF WHAT IT THINKS IS SO (YOUR
PREMISE).
YOUR EGO CAN ONLY ALLOW YOU TO SEE AS A POSSIBLE CHOICE THE RESPONSE THAT WILL
SUPPORT WHAT IT THINKS IS TRUE.
IF YOU ARE WONDERING WHAT YOUR PREMISE IS, JUST LOOK AT YOUR EXPERIENCES IN
LIFE.
AFFIRMATIONS CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH, UNLESS SOMETHING IN THE
BEDROCK OF YOUR BELIEF IS CHANGED.
AFFIRMATIONS THAT WORK ARE AN ESSENTIAL PART OF A POSITIVE MENTAL POSITION.
A WISH IS A DECLARATION, OF THE MOUTH THAT THE MIND KNOWS IS A LIE.
LOVE IS PRESENT EVERYWHERE. LOVE IS THE ESSENCE OF MY REALITY. I CONSTANTLY
ATTRACT THE RIGHT PEOPLE WHO ALLOW ME TO EXPRESS AND EXPERIENCE THE LOVE
THAT I AM.

CHAPTER 4
BELIEF SYSTEMS
So what are the beliefs that produce your life experiences for you so effortlessly? And if
you don't like them, what can you do to change them?
Psychology tells us that two factors make up your belief system and subsequent
behavior: heredity and environment. Through the genes of each of two cells that come
together to form the life that you become, you inherit certain noticeable characteristics of your
ancestors, such as blond hair, square chin, big feet, etc., which affect your behavior. A greater
and continuing determinant of your behavior is the environment in which you grow: everything
you learn from experiences with your parents, peers, teachers, doctors, and so forth. Of far
greater importance to your belief system is not whether you have big feet, but how the world
treats people with big feet, how having big feet affects your life, and what you believe about
people with big feet. Now include beliefs about square chins, blond hair, skin color, religions,
nationalities, etc. The belief system that results is what I call your PREMISE.
Your premise is the total of all you believe about life, yourself, and your relationship to
everything. This system of beliefs will also be referred to as ego. The best way to define ego is
this: it's "What I think I am." It is not the reality of what you are, but everything you have
come to believe is true about you. Here are some important aspects of your premise or ego.
1.

It is not Truth. If it were, it would remain constant, and would be the same for
everyone.

2.

You made it up, and it changes every moment of every day, so it is like a fantasy or an
illusion.

3.

Because you made it, you love it, and must defend it at all costs.

You can criticize and ridicule what you make, and frequently do. Yet if anyone else
criticizes, you become very defensive. While we lived in England, I discovered that a common
pastime is criticizing the Royal Family and the archaic tradition that it represents. If an outsider
wants to remain healthy, however, he'd better not join in any criticism of anything so beloved as
the Queen.

WHAT YOU MAKE, YOU LOVE, AND MUST PROTECT AND DEFEND WITH EVERYTHING YOU
HAVE.
Just notice how proud parents are of their new baby. Notice how excited you are to
share a new idea, and how hurt you become if the world scoffs at it. The idea may not be real
or true, but you think it is, and you made it, so must defend it.
What are the beliefs that you have made up, and are therefore proud of, and must
defend? Obviously, there are thousands. Ironically many of them contradict others, which
explains your occasional indecisiveness and confusion. When you have mixed feelings about
something, it must divide your allegiance, your effort and your effectiveness, and in the extreme
it will immobilize you.
There are, however, a few deeply ingrained beliefs which guide the world and control

your life to the degree you have accepted them. And you have accepted them to some degree.
I am not going to attempt to prove or disprove their validity, but you need to be aware that
they exist. We'll discuss the affect they have on your life, and what you can do about them.
GUILT: At the very bedrock of the world's belief system lies what could be considered as your
core belief: that there is something inherently wrong with being human. I'm not talking about
overtly illegal or immoral acts, though each of those add to the cross of unacceptability that we
all bear. Just being born burdens you with the guilt of Adam's wrongdoing, for which you must
be punished. Sure, members of each religion have their own solution but for you to enjoy their
solution you must first accept their condemnation. Even if you totally reject the various
religious teachings, you cannot escape the benefits of the saturation of guilt. If you've ever felt
ashamed, embarrassed, inadequate, or felt for a moment that you didn't like yourself, it comes
from the ageless teaching that you are guilty.
An important aspect of this concept is that you know that guilt calls for punishment, and
that both guilt and punishment will follow you past the grave and into eternity. This imagined
guilt is the thing you fear the most because of its consequences (punishment). Therefore, you
want most of all to get rid of it. The guilt complex is what makes you sabotage your own
dreams. It's what makes you allow (and, in the extreme, even welcome) abusive treatment
from others. You abuse yourself with very difficult problems which, rather than correcting, you
"learn to live with." It's called trying to expiate your guilt. You punish yourself now, hoping to
lessen the punishment you know you have coming later (a lot more on this when we get to
relationships and healing).
While teaching in Japan, I found the Oriental belief system doesn't include much about
guilt; instead, they replace it with a tremendous concern about shame.
BODY: That you are a physical body is a pretty widely accepted idea and probably the most
difficult one to truly change. You look in a mirror and think, "That's me." You see someone
walking down the street and identify them according to their physical appearance. When the
body is in pain it seems very real. When you are attracted to another, initially it is their body
that you focus on as the attracting force. You spend the bulk of your money, time, and effort
seeking comfort and pleasure for the body.
SEPARATE: Because you think you are a body, you appear to be separate, and therefore act as
though you have separate interests. Ownership of things in the world reinforces this idea.
These things are mine, those things are yours. If I am able to maneuver one of your things into
my pile, I have gained and you have lost. To the degree your personal beliefs differ from
another's, you will appear to have separate purpose in your life, supporting the world's premise
that you are separate.
The more important aspect of this concept is that you imagine that all your good comes
from a power which is outside and separate from you. A typical prayer includes pleading,
begging, or beseeching a power "up there."
INCOMPLETE: Mostly because you believe you are a body, you have certain needs. If you were
whole or complete, you could have no needs.
Part of the world's recent teaching to
enhance mental and emotional health is to state what your needs are. Let people know. You
will see later that what you teach you learn, so the more you declare your needs to the world,
the more you will teach yourself that you are incomplete.
Now don't get me wrong, you do have needs. Your true needs are not physical however,

and yet because you think you are a physical body, your needs appear to be physical. And when
you focus on trying to satisfy your needs in the physical realm, you forget who you are.
We'll discuss all of these in much greater detail as we go along. There are many more
that we could include, but these are enough to make up a belief system which we will call the
world's premise.
We've already discussed how your rational mind guides you to respond to the world with
choices that provide experiences to support these beliefs. This is what's called teaching and
learning. When you respond with these ideas, you are telling the world (and teaching yourself)
what you believe is true. Because your experience supports the premise that guided your
choice, you reinforce the ideas for yourself. And that's the learning.

YOU REALLY TEACH ONLY YOURSELF.

You don't learn anything from what you see or hear or read. That only makes you
aware of an idea, but you haven't learned it. It's not yours until you express it, give it away, or
teach it. The true purpose for teaching (sharing) anything is to reinforce it in your own mind.

The belief
system that guides
your choices is like a voice for the world; we'll call it the ego. Its sole function is to help you,
through its guidance, to prove that you are right, that what you believe is really true. It is what
provides an instant reaction to everything that happens. Though it has unlimited power over
your reactions, its options are limited, and locked in to only what fits with your deep-seated
beliefs. Remember, if you wonder what is at the core of your belief system, just look at your
experiences: not what happens to you, but how you experience it.

THE EGO IS NOT THE BAD GUY; IT IS SIMPLY A COLLECTION OF BELIEFS.

The ego is the voice for the world, and must counsel and guide you to those choices that
will prove through your experience that the world is right. It is only a guidance system. On a
Cruise missile carrying a nuclear warhead, there is nothing evil about the computer that guides it
to its target. Not even the computer programer is to blame. In this case, the fault lies with a
deep-seated belief that there are "others" in the world that must be destroyed for me to be
happy.
Let us recognize that your individual ego differs from the world's ego to the extent that
you disagree with any of the details of the world's beliefs. Because the ego is only a belief
system of "what I think I am," you will never be without an ego. You can never transcend it,
only transform it. As you change what you believe to be true, your ego becomes less in harmony
with what the world teaches, and your new ego (new belief system) provides guidance for new

instant reactions, and thereby new experiences to support your new beliefs effortlessly. Many
times a person will say, "I understand what you are saying, but how can I make it work in my life?"
This one is fairly simple. You learn what you teach, so:

DETERMINE CAREFULLY WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN AND TEACH IT.

Then if appearances don't seem to reveal immediate results, don't give up. A baby doesn't
stop trying to walk just because it falls a few times, or even a few hundred. What you have
learned very completely in error may take some time to unlearn.
The world has determined (based on appearances) that you are a body, that you are
separated, and most importantly, that you are guilty. These are not true, but they are what the
world must have you experience because that is its premise, and thus becomes its purpose.
Another form of this question is, "I believe what you say, but why do I still have so many
problems (frustrations, etc.)." This can be a real situation of be ing aware of something, and
maybe wishing it were true, but not believing it (premise). Your experiences will always reveal
your premise. I don't mean what happens to you, but how you experience it. Let's imagine that a
big dog leaps into the room where we are sitting. Now, I don't like dogs and am scared of big
dogs, so I jump up on a chair. However, you love dogs and kneel down to pet him. The same
event can result in a much different experience for each of us.
You will probably have some seemingly unreasonable things happen to you during your life,
and only your premise will determine whether your experience of it is a blessing or a grievance.
What the world teaches is like a story - a story that has been handed down through the
ages and has been around so long that it's difficult to realize that it has been made up. It is a
fantasy, not carved in granite. It changes all the time, and just when you want to depend on it, it's
not that way anymore.
Well, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is another
story. The bad news is that the old story is so deeply ingrained and so precious, that the chance
for you to make any major change in one lifetime is extremely remote. The script for your life was
written in your first five years. More than just a desire for comfort is required for any real change.
But let's look at that other story in the next chapter.
CHECKLIST
WHAT YOU MAKE, YOU LOVE, AND MUST PROTECT AND DEFEND WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE.
THE EGO IS NOT THE BAD GUY; IT IS SIMPLY A COLLECTION OF BELIEFS.
DETERMINE CAREFULLY WHAT YOU WANT TO LEARN AND TEACH IT.
YOU REALLY TEACH ONLY YOURSELF.

CHAPTER 5
LOVE
Unfortunately, we can't truly know what love is or define it in normal terms. The word love
is used in the world's story, so it's going to be difficult (though ab solutely essential) that we pull it
out of any ordinary context. We can easily point out some things that love is not.
First, you can't get love; people don't make love. Love has nothing to do with behavior nor
is it found in any ritual. In reality, it's what you are. Let me ask you to give up your normal way of
seeing things, and imagine with me that the reality of you is not the physical body as it appears,
but is the energy that keeps that body functioning. We'll call this energy love. That's who you are.
You have all the attributes of love much the same as a ray of sunlight contains all the attributes of
the light that the sun produces. And you are connected in the same way that a ray of sunlight
remains connected with the sun, and through its source is connected to every other ray of sunlight.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SEPARATED FROM YOUR SOURCE, WHICH IS LOVE.

Sound pretty far out? Well, hang in there; we've only just begun. There are certain rules in
this story and, unlike the rules of the world, they remain constant. You can depend on them. You
learn what you teach. Much the same way that the student who stands up in class and explains
the homework assignment is the one who learns it best, each story that you tell to another has one
purpose: to reinforce it as truth in your own mind. For example, after you have an argument, you
talk to yourself, reliving what he said and what you said to get real clear in your mind that you
were right and he was wrong. Then you go tell your friends a story that convinces them how you
are a victim of his attack. You gather witnesses to his guilt (based on your side of the story) that's called teaching guilt. Remember, you teach only yourself. It has little to do with the words.
The words can be sweet but if the thought or attitude is sour, it is sour that you experience and
learn.

THE SOLE PURPOSE FOR TEACHING IS TO REINFORCE YOUR OWN BELIEF.

You have only what you share (or extend). In the above example, you have guilt because
you shared guilt. You can't have forgiveness when you give away guilt. And as you give
something away, it increases. The more people to whom you tell your story, the stronger your
belief in it becomes. You can give away an idea or thought and still have it. Thoughts are things,
so when you give a thing as a gift you are really giving the thought or idea of it. The thing or gift is
just
a symbol for that thought of it. Since you have what you give, there is no loss in giving.

YOU NEVER HAVE WHAT YOU GET; YOU ONLY HAVE WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY.
The world would have you feel an attraction for another body. You see love in them which
you want so desperately, so you try to get love from them. You are told the way to do that is to
possess them (more accurately, possess their body).

YOU CAN? GET LOVE FROM "OUT THERE," BECAUSE LOVE IS WHAT YOU ARE.
You can only give love, share it, or extend it. And only if you share love do you have it (i.e.,
become aware of it as your reality), and as you share it, it in creases (re-inforced in your
awareness). Do you see the way these rules work?
Another way of saying this came from my early Sunday school class: Jesus said the
kingdom of heaven is in you. I could never imagine a place being in me, but that kingdom must
only be love, and that's what is in me.
One very clever way the world keeps its story safe is to include love as part of its story, but

give it different meanings. For example, it tries to say love manipulates with phrases like, "if you
loved me, you would do this or wouldn't do that." What it is really teaching is guilt, and the phrase
should read, "if you don't want to feel guilty, you should do this or shouldn't do that." The world
has taught you that love is painful. When you become infatuated with someone and want to own
them, you call it falling in love. The desire to own someone comes from the world's teaching that
you can get love and can only have what you hold onto tightly. Attempts to own someone can
result in a lot of pain.

THE WORLD'S BELIEF SYSTEM CAN ONLY PROVIDE SUBSTITUTES FOR LOVE.
The ultimate substitute for love is sex, a really great body contact sport seldom engaged in
for its original purpose: to make babies. It is one of the best witnesses that you are a body and
the world's most effective tool for guilt. That sex somehow got equated with love is the world's
greatest coup for preserving its story.
The attempt to understand what you want to experience so desperately has given you an
endless list of attributes of human behavior (kindness, compassion, sympathy, etc.). None are
love. Some are positive reflections of love and others are very poor substitutes.
Do not let fear try to give love more identity in an attempt to understand it and thus create
more myths and superstitions. The tools you have chosen with which to think and judge limit you,
and prevent you from truly knowing what love is. They do not, however, prevent you from
becoming aware of love's presence and its ability to express through you. Just because you don't
know what electricity is, doesn't mean you must remain forever in darkness. Love's presence and
power cannot be weighed or measured or analyzed under a microscope. That does not negate its
reality.

LOVE CAN BE PERCEIVED ONLY WHEN PRESENT IN THE MIND OF THE PERCEIVER.
Love is therefore not found "out there," but extended from within the perceiver to the form
perceived, from which its presence is reflected. Love is what you are. You learn this as you teach
it, and you only have it as you share it. So what is love's story? We are really fortunate: To find
out what love would teach, you need only to look at what the: world teaches, and reverse it.
You are NOT

You ARE

World's story

Love's story

guilt

innocence

body

spirit

separate

one

incomplete

whole

Remember, now, that you are an energy which we call love. As that energy, you have
never done anything of which you are guilty or for which punishment is appropriate. Oh yeah?
What about the body? "It's done plenty, to be ashamed of and for which it should be punished,"
you say. I guess it was Mark Twain who said, "of all the animals, only man expresses shame, and
should." As we become more civilized, we find more and more behavior that offends our
neighbors, all of which relates to the body. But we're speaking on the level where you are not a
body, but spirit. What do we mean by spirit? I'm sure at some time you've had the feeling that
there is more to you than just a body. Well, it is that "more" to which I refer. We call it love, and
its essence is spirit.

ON THE LEVEL OF SPIRIT, WE ARE ONE.

On the level of spirit we are not separate. Two years on the Board of Directors for the
Southern California Society for Psychical Research showed me that on that level we are one in
thought, desire, and reality. And on that level of spirit, you are not incomplete; all your needs are
met; you are whole.
Early in Chapter One we referred to one aspect of your mind having two forms: Conscious
and subconscious. Now we'll discuss the other aspect of your mind. It is the part of your mind that
knows your reality. It knows you only as whole, as spirit, as innocent, and as one with everyone.
Love's story may not have a ring of truth for you. You may wish it were so, but do not
experience it in your life. How can you ever hope to learn a different story when the ego can only
guide you to respond in terms of the world's teachings? Fortunately, there is another voice. That's
right, there is a voice for love. It's that still, small voice that waits for you to ask, and then can only
guide you to respond in such a way as to experience that what love teaches is true. It is spirit, in
essence, whose only purpose is to teach you that you are whole. That's why in religious teachings
it is referred to as Holy Spirit. It is your voice for love. You can call it Holy Spirit, White Eagle,
intuition, or what ever you want. It doesn't matter, so long as you understand that it is the voice
for love. We will refer to this other aspect of your mind in terms of its function, it is your innervision.
Inner, to remind you that it is not outside yourself. Vision, to reflect what is seen through the eyes
of love as opposed to perception which is seeing through the filter of the world's belief system.
Perception (a device of
the ego) uses
appearance as its source
of understanding,
and guides you do to
meet your
physical needs. Your
inner-vision uses
Love as its source of
understanding,
and guides you how to
think to meet
your
spiritual/mental/e
motional needs.
Here,
then, is what we have:

You have two diametrically opposed belief systems and a voice for each. The ego cannot
guide you to experiences of the love system, and your inner-vi sion cannot guide you to
experiences of the world's system. So the experiences that you enjoy reveal which voice you have
followed. The ego has a lot of tricks; one of them is to disguise itself as your innervision, and give
advice that would appear to be loving but in truth is a substitute for love.
I have pointed out that the world teaches that you are incomplete. Much of your life
experience involves satisfying your many physical needs, which support the ego's idea of
incompleteness and lack. You've heard stories of the super-enlightened yogis who can sleep on
nails, require no food or water, and take a breath every 30 minutes. But I think it is important to
acknowledge that in the everyday normal world in which you struggle to survive, the experience of
physical needs seems very real. Some teachers who counsel you to deny that those needs exist
aren't doing you a favor. Even worse, the guru that admonishes you to serve some higher power
so that "all your needs will be met" (implying physical needs) has misappropriated a concept that is

very important for you to understand and accept.

Any life crisis has both physical and mental/emotional aspects. Hunger, pain, or illness on
the physical side will usually be accompanied by anguish, fear, or guilt on the mental/emotional
side. While the voice for love remains unconcerned with the physical needs, it will guide you
instantly how to think to achieve peace of mind. So it is on the mental/emotional level that "all
your needs are met" and, I might add, effortlessly. It shouldn't appear so strange that when you
are able to gain peace of mind in a crisis, somehow the crisis begins to dissolve.

AS THE CRY IN THE CRISIS DISSOLVES, THE EVENT BECOMES WHAT "IS."
CHECKLIST

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO BE SEPARATED FROM YOUR SOURCE, WHICH IS LOVE.

THE SOLE P{URPOSE OF TEACHING IS TO REINFORCE YOUR OWN BELIEF
YOU NEVER HAVE WHAT YOU GET; YOU ONLY HAVE WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY.
YOU CANT GET LOVE FROM "OUT THERE," BECAUSE LOVE IS WHAT YOU ARE.
THE WORLD'S BELIEF SYSTEM CAN ONLY PROVIDE SUBSTITUTES FOR LOVE.
LOVE CAN BE PERCEIVED ONLY WHEN PRESENT IN THE MIND OF THE PERCEIVER.
ON THE LEVEL OF SPIRIT, WE ARE ONE.
AS THE CRY IN THE CRISIS DISSOLVES, THE EVENT BECOMES WHAT "IS."

CHAPTER 6
HOW DO I TEACH LOVE?
First, a little review. There is something within you that knows your wholeness. It is that
aspect of mind which, if used as a guide, will always lead to an experience of peace, harmony, and
love. There's nothing magical or special about it; it is in everyone. It may seem mystical, but
that's only because it is little understood and seldom used. This aspect of mind provides your
inner-vision.
It will not typically tread where uninvited, so you must ask it. When you do, it will respond
immediately. The awareness of this inner-vision comes in different ways. To some, a voice; to
others, a knowing or urging; and to still others, a feeling, impression, or thought. Because you are
used to listening only to the ego's voice, which is very loud and arrogant, in the beginning it is
sometimes difficult to discern when it is the right answer. Here are some guidelines:

GUIDANCE FROM YOUR INNER-VISION IS IMMEDIATE, GENTLE, AND ALWAYS RESULTS IN A

PEACEFUL EXPERIENCE.
Of course, you can't judge the advice by its results until after you follow it. So the
awareness of the peaceful aspect only comes after you have acted in response to its guidance.
However, this tells you when you have chosen correctly, and builds confidence in making that kind
of choice again.
Why does a choice seem necessary? Because you will hear two voices. Ego will yell at you
with the answers the world would have you follow. The other voice will answer softly, gently, and
usually with a logic that is contradictory to the thinking of the world. Many say they don't hear it
because it is too subtle, and they'd like a blast of trumpets and a Hollywood-type flash in the sky.
Another reason is that the answer may seem illogical. But just a moment's reason tells you that
you're asking because you are really puzzled, and the logical thinking of the world hasn't worked.
So the answer that will lead to peace must seem illogical.
The next question is, "What do I ask?" That depends solely on what you want to teach.
Let us imagine that you're in a great big mud puddle of confusion and frustration and a little anger.
In your splashing around, trying to get out, all you get is more muddy. Let's say someone has tried
to take advantage of you (your perception). Your goal could be to try to get the upper hand, and
prove you're right and he's wrong, and maybe teach him a lesson so he doesn't try it gain (fear).
Also maybe throw in a little anger that could make him feel guilty, by which you could manipulate
his behavior in the future. If you ask your inner-vision, "How can I make him sorry he attacked
me?" you shouldn't be surprised at the silence.

GUILT, ANGER, AND FEAR ARE TEACHINGS OF THE EGO, NOT THE VOICE FOR LOVE.
The ego would have you teach guilt, anger, and fear so that they would become your
experience and your apparent reality. But we have determined that your reality is love, so if you
teach guilt, anger, and fear, you are teaching deceit. You'll be trying to prove that you are what
you are not. Your experience will truly be confusion, anxiety, and frustration. It's important to
note here that whatever aspect of your life is involved in this little exercise (body, money, or
relationships) will endure considerable stress with very unhealthy consequences. If what you truly
want is peace, and totally commit yourself to this, then there is one question to ask your innervision, "How do I teach love in this relationship?"

THERE IS NO RELATIONSHIP IN WHICH YOU CANNOT TEACH LOVE.

The answer will always be some seemingly unrelated truth about yourself such as "Your
reality is love, you cannot be attacked" or "You are safe." Your ego will then quickly yell at you
about how stupid and illogical that thought is. But it is exactly the loving thought which will guide

you to an experience of peace, harmony, wholeness, or whatever seemed to be lacking. These are
your true needs fulfilled.
The problem is that you think that guilt, anger, and fear will buy you something that you
want. Only when you're ready to give up your investment in suffering and revenge can you ask
this question, and experience the peace that follows. It's my experience that most of the time you
don't have to ask to know what the loving thing is to do. You just don't want to do it because you
see some value in doing something else. More on this when we get to healing.

YOUR PREMISE DETERMINES WHAT YOU EXPERIENCE IN EACH HAPPENING.

You can tell what you believe about yourself and your relationship to life and others by just
looking around at what you see (not what is there, but how you see it). When someone doesn't
respond to you as they should, are you disappointed, annoyed, or angry? When you don't respond
as you feel you should, are you filled with guilt and remorse? When someone else receives a
blessing that you desire, do you feel jealous or resentful? All these are equally destructive to your
peace, and they call for correction, because they are attempts to teach the world and yourself that
you are what you are not.

YOU DONT HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THE ASPECT OF YOUR THINKING THAT IS IN ERROR.
Trying to understand the error would be dwelling on the problem, trying to make sense of
your fear. Fear doesn't make any sense. Another error is trying to focus on a source for your
problem in your past There may have been something in the past that initiated an erroneous
belief, but that is not the problem. The problem is why are you continuing to nurture the error
today. All you need do is focus on your purpose. When you ask your inner-vision, "How do I see
peace in this situation?" the answer may be, "There is nothing to worry about" or "You are not
guilty" or some similar idea that will lead to peace.
Remember that you are carrying thousands of ideas about yourself, stored way back in
your computer (most of them securely in place by the age of five). The negative beliefs could be
called inhibitors because they restrict you to a very narrow tunnel vision with only the options to
respond in a negative way that will support the belief.
When something happens that causes a negative experience, it's because the world has
just brought one of those inhibitors up into your awareness. It may be an old belief "I'm not safe."
This is a very inhibiting thought that would lead you to some defensive dance.
The inhibiting thought is like a filter that causes you to see the situation from a very limited
perspective. When you ask your inner-vision to see it differ ently, your immediate thought will be a
correction of the old inhibitor. The form may be a thought "You are safe" or a feeling "I am safe".
Even though contrary to appearances, it is exactly what you want to learn is true about
you. Your possible responses increase tremendously. If you trust your inner-vision and respond
accordingly, you will be teaching the new thought and thereby learn it.
Some folks have developed the belief that their inner-vision has guided them as to where
their body should be or how it should behave. This error is easily understood. In a fearful
situation, you may be aware of very few options. Receiving from your inner-vision the thought
"You are safe", allows your options to increase tremendously. You can now see possibilities that
were blocked by your fear. You can now choose a course of action previously believed impossible.
Your response is still your choice. Your inner-vision doesn't tell you what to do or where to be. It
guides you how to think while you respond.
Remember, what you do (your behavior) is not important. It is the thought that is guiding
you that you are teaching (yourself), and the resulting experience is that you learn that it is true.
Your inner-vision doesn't tell you what to do, it just corrects the old inhibitors that cause negative
perceptions and limit options. But just hearing the new thought changes nothing. It is in the
teaching (letting it guide your response) that you learn it.

THERE IS NO SITUATION IN WHICH YOU CANNOT CREATE PEACE.

If you are not committed to peace, you will disregard the peaceful idea for some ego
reason. That's all right; nothing's lost, you'll get another chance to learn this lesson. Every day life
gives you hundreds of chances to teach and, as a result, learn who you are. When you teach guilt,
anger, and fear, you are being deceitful and experience both mental anguish and frustration. Many
times this immobilizes your creativity and puts a stress on your body that results in pain, and
disease.

WHEN YOU TEACH LOVE, YOU ARE BEING HONEST AND YOU EXPERIENCE PEACE AND
FULFILLMENT
When the result is peace, it is an honor to your right-mindedness. When it is other than
peace, it just means you've chosen in error, and will get another opportunity to choose.

WHY?
One of the first questions the ego comes up with is, "Why?" For example, "if we are really
perfect love, why do we have to go through this nonsense to become aware that we are perfect
love?"
"Why do people have to be born, only to die?"
"Why do I get all the bad luck?"
Why me?
These why questions can effectively derail your progress toward peace of mind unless you
can change them to "how" questions. For instance, not "Why doesn't this work," but "How can I
make this work?" Instead of "Why am I in this mess," you ask, "How can I get out of this mess?"
The "Why me?" syndrome claims an unfair pain or loss, but also implies that for someone else it
would be fair.
"Why" is an unanswerable question, bred in fear, nurtured in perplexity, the goal of which is
confusion. When you convert it to a "how" question, tremen dous progress can be made. If you
refuse to paint until you find out why blue and yellow make green, you will never be able to
express on canvas the beauty that is within you. If you refuse to turn on the light until you know
why electricity works, you will remain forever in darkness.

CHANGE THE "WHY" TO A "HOW" AND THE WHOLE OF CREATION IS AT YOUR SERVICE.
How can you mix colors so as to express your beauty? How can you make electricity work?
How can you use the apparent mess that you've created to teach love? This may seem to be a
cop-out, leaving you as confused about life's eternal questions as any other ideas you studied.
There have been many attempts to answer the why's of life's mysteries. Some are beautiful, some
are crackpot, some are highly complex and seem reasonable at the time, but don't hold up. All are
conjecture and just one step short of mythology.
Yes, you'll have moments of revelation with a warm feeling of bliss and wisdom where all
doubts are suspended, and in those moments, never once does "why" raise its ugly head. The
mysteries of life are accurately called imponderables. They are the mud puddles of the mind that
keep you from seeing clearly.
Let others ask the "why"s and try to answer them. Some make interesting reading. When
you come to a "why," if you will immediately change it to a "how," you'll create a sense of peace
and well-being for yourself, and a benefit for everyone around you.

CHECKLIST
GUIDANCE FROM YOUR INNER-VISION IS IMMEDIATE, GENTLE, AND ALWAYS RESULTS IN A
PEACEFUL EXPERIENCE.
GUILT, ANGER, AND FEAR ARE TEACHINGS OF THE EGO, NOT THE VOICE FOR LOVE.
THERE IS NO RELATIONSHIP IN WHICH YOU CANNOT TEACH LOVE.
YOUR PREMISE DETERMINES WHAT YOU EXPERIENCE IN EACH HAPPENING.
YOU DON'T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THE ASPECT OF YOUR THINKING THAT IS IN ERROR.
THERE IS NO SITUATION IN WHICH YOU CANNOT CREATE PEACE.
WHEN YOU TEACH LOVE, YOU ARE BEING HONEST AND YOU EXPERIENCE PEACE AND
FULFILLMENT.
CHANGE THE "WHY" TO A "HOW" AND THE WHOLE OF CREATION IS AT YOUR SERVICE.

CHAPTER 7
GRATITUDE AND FORGIVENESS
Let's imagine that you are a mind, swimming around in the sea of life. Your essence is a
collection of ideas (mostly negative) that reflect themselves in many forms. Your personality is a
reflection of your ideas or beliefs. Your physical body presents to the world a sculpture of your
belief system. Every cell in your body will replace itself many times in your life. The sculpture
gradually changes to represent the changes in what you believe about yourself. Have you ever
noticed how two people living together for a very long time gradually start to look alike as more
and more they think alike? Now as you have various encounters in life, you will respond to them
according to what you believe is happening. Then, of course, an experience to reinforce your belief
will follow.

THE EXPERIENCES YOU MANUFACTURE REFLECT WHAT YOU BELIEVE.

How then does gratitude and forgiveness fit into this? Well, during your daily swim in the
sea of life, you bump into other "collections of ideas" represent ing themselves as bodies and
personalities, and you have what is called an encounter. Now think of each of these "others" as a
mirror because what you perceive about them is really a picture of what is going on in your own
head. Sure, someone is really there, but his presence triggers pictures in your mind which you
project onto him. Everything is a daydream. What we call awareness is only internal reverie
stimulated by input from your senses (eyes, ears, etc.)

THEREAREONLY TWO LOVING EXPRESSIONS OF LIFE: GRATITUDE AND FORGIVENESS!

When an encounter triggers a warm, comfortable feeling, this other (your mirror) is reflecting
something you like about yourself. The appropriate and very important expression is gratitude.
You may not recognize exactly what you like so much about this other person because the form in
which you see it expressed may not reveal the content of the characteristic that is similar to yours
(this is important to remember when we get farther along into forgiveness).

BE ALERT FOR THE BLESSINGS THAT OCCUR IN YOUR LIFEAS OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRATITUDE.
Every positive encounter reflects the beauty within you waiting to be expressed, and
gratitude is the releasing mechanism. Gratitude is essential to reinforce your awareness of your
reality as love.
The flip side of that coin should start to become painfully apparent. When an encounter
triggers fear in some form (anger, guilt, frustration, disappoint ment, annoyance, etc.) this other
(your mirror) is reflecting something you don't like about yourself. Now the appropriate and very
important expression is forgiveness. The negative thought that has been triggered by the outside
stimulus must be recalled and replaced with another thought.
Forgiveness means simply to give one thought (negative) for another (positive). There are
three essential elements to understand about forgiveness:
1.

It is always difficult. It always seems to require a loss or sacrifice, but never does.

2.

The mind that holds the idea is not the mind that can give it up. Help is needed.

3.

It always results in a real benefit, a blessing.

Now let's remember that your mind is full of thoughts or ideas that the world has taught
you over many years. If you've bought everything the world was teaching, those ideas have
become deep-seated beliefs. They are pretty negative. (Review the chapter on Belief Systems.)

Even those ideas that appear to be friendly or loving, as the world teaches, are substitutes for love.

A SUBSTITUTE FOR LOVE LEADS AWAY FROM LOVE TOWARD ITS OPPOSITE, WHICH IS FEAR.
For example, let's say there is someone in your life that you really don't like. You are
taught that when you see them in public, you should be "nice" to them (a seemingly friendly thing
to do). However, "nice" is an ego substitute for love and a sick relationship is never healed by just
being nice to someone.

FORGIVENESS IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN HEAL A SICK RELATIONSHIP.

But the world doesn't teach you this, so the sick relationship is protected forever in conflict,
safe from healing. It is the idea inside that causes the discom fort, and that's really good because
you can do something about that. All attempts to change the outside stimulus as a way to relieve
the discomfort in your daydream will be frustrating and ineffective. Repeated attempts can only
turn your daydream into a nightmare.

REMEMBER, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG "OUT THERE."

Now let's look at how the three elements of forgiveness come into play. First, "it is always
difficult." Not that forgiveness itself is difficult; it requires no effort at all. But the decision to
forgive is always difficult. We're talking about giving up an idea; an idea that you've accepted from
the world's teachings or that you've made up yourself. In either case, because you've embraced it,
it is very precious to you, and you defend it with all your power.
Remember, you are a collection of ideas, that's who you think you are. You see the world
the way you do now because that's the way you believe it is. To give it up would be to say that
you were wrong. Sometimes even when you know you have been wrong, and know that you
would be better off to give up an old grievance, you still cling to it tenaciously. To some degree,
you would have to give up how you see the world now. And that, of course, is exactly what
forgiveness requires.

FOR YOU TO GIVE UP ONE OF YOUR COLLECTION OF IDEAS WOULD CAUSE YOU TO SEE THE
WHOLE WORLD DIFFERENTLY.
Here we should note that when you witness someone doing something stupid or anti-social,
and you remain undisturbed by their behavior, that is not forgiveness. Their behavior falls within
the range of your tolerance. Technically, however, if you are not able to express gratitude in a
situation (because you've judged it stupid or anti-social), forgiveness is called for, and you're
kidding yourself to fake acceptance. When you make the judgment that something is wrong or bad
or someone has been harmed, you now have a grievance, and forgiveness is called for.
Continuing with the elements of forgiveness, "it always seems to represent a loss or
sacrifice." Think of someone that has done you wrong, in some way harmed you or your friend. To
imagine them getting away with it without some punishment or compensation means you lose. To
let them off the hook without even an apology would be to sacrifice your righteous wrath. For
instance I hear people say "I don't get angry, I get even." Or, "I can forgive, but I can never
forget." As if somehow to lose the memory of that hurt would be some great loss. In a moment of
sanity, is it possible to imagine that the memory of that hurt holds absolutely no value?
I remember when I was a small boy I had a red wagon of which I was very proud. I played
with it constantly. It was precious to me, and to give it up would have been a tremendous
sacrifice. Then for a birthday, I was given a brand new tricycle. And when asked if I would give the
wagon to a neighbor boy, I could do it with no sense of loss. Forgiveness is a process of seeing
value in a new idea, which allows you to give up an old idea that you used to hold dear.

FORGIVENESS DOES NOT ASK THAT YOU FORGET THAT SOMETHING HAPPENED.

It simply asks you to look at what happened from another perspective, and that leads us
into the second element of forgiveness.
"The mind that holds the idea is not the mind that can give it up. It needs help." It is the
ego (a collection of ideas) that has processed what happened "out there," and decided that
something is wrong and you've been hurt. That's one perspective, and it results in a grievance.
On the other hand, your inner-vision, which knows that your reality is love and cannot be hurt, sees
that nothing is wrong. The culprit (your mirror) is doing a dance, not against you but for you, to
reflect an idea you hold about yourself that is detrimental to your own well being. This may be
starting to sound crazy; let's try it another way.
From your collection let's pick one idea which is most pervasive and most harmful to your
happiness: GUILT. Your belief in guilt causes you more fear than any thing else because it calls for
punishment. Therefore you want to free yourself of it more than anythingelse. Imagine that this
belief in guilt is like a giant iceberg floating in the ocean.

It is your idea bobbing up and down in your ocean of consciousness. Like an iceberg,
ninety percent of which is below the surface of the water, the great bulk of this belief in guilt is
below the level of your awareness, in your subconscious. The tip represents those little tacky
things you hold against yourself which you can readily call to mind. For instance if you committed
a social faux pas at a party, and were embarrassed, or maybe you stole a candy bar when you
were five, and always felt a little sorry for doing it. Maybe you called in to work sick so you could
go fishing, and felt pretty irresponsible all day, or maybe you were part of a big foul up, and
someone else got blamed for it. Remember these examples; we'll use them again.
Now if all of the negative ideas you can remember about yourself are represented by the tip
of the iceberg, imagine the tremendous amount of subcon scious garbage you carry below the
surface of your awareness. Maybe the tremendous inadequacy you felt as a child because you
could never meet your parent's expectations, but could never clearly identify the negative feelings
or the cause. Maybe, as a three year old you witnessed a big fight between your parents, and
blamed yourself, and wished you had never been born, and then totally repressed it. There are
thousands of reasons for disliking yourself: they go all the way back to the first book in the Bible
and the fall of Adam.
On days when you feel blue, maybe a larger portion of the iceberg of ideas is above the
surface, so you are advised by the ego (the mind that holds these ideas) to go to a movie to take
your mind off it or take a Valium, or anything that will help you push down the iceberg. But that
doesn't rid you of the negative beliefs. It only represses them below your awareness, where they
are safe to attack you at another time when you are vulnerable.
So the ego (simply a collection of ideas) which would be destroying itself by giving up one
of the ideas in its collection can guide you only to cover it up or hide it, but not to give it up. You
need help from your inner-vision, the mind that knows you from the perspective of your reality,
which is love.

ASKING THE EGO TO FORGIVE IS LIKE ASKING AN ARSONIST TO HELP PUT OUT A FIRE.

The program for freeing yourself from guilt could not have been planned better, but it is not
without a catch. For each of the thousands of little negative thoughts you have about yourself,
there is someone swimming around "out there" who will help you become aware of just the
thought that you are ready to deal with at any particular time. And that thought has nothing to do
with that "other" person. Your inner-vision knows you couldn't possibly deal with the whole iceberg
at once. It would be too overwhelming.
So imagine there are maybe a dozen negative thoughts, any one of which you could deal
with at this time. However, up to this point you have kept these thoughts successfully repressed
(the ego's way to keep them safe from forgiveness). A triggering mechanism is needed to bring
them to your awareness, where you can deal with them. So an "other" swims by for whose
presence you don't feel instant gratitude. You "see" something in them that you don't like
(remember now, he's your mirror). He may be a drunk lying in a gutter, an irresponsible behavior
you can easily criticize or condemn. The ego says, "How can this be a reflection of me? I don't
even drink!" And here's the catch: because you don't relate to the form, you think it can't be
reflecting thoughts about yourself. And the content of not liking yourself for times that you were
irresponsible remains safely intact in your iceberg of guilt.
Here's how it works. As your turkey appears, the first indication that you have something
to deal with is that you see some problem with him. (1) He pushes your button. But the problem is
not with him, it is in your mind. His presence causes (2) a little chunk of guilt to rise from the
repressed
iceberg up into your
awareness.

Your ego sees someone to dump on (3), and by so doing reinforces its position(4). You
find his behavior easy to criticize or condemn. Maybe he lied to the boss, saying you were
responsible for his mistake, and caused you to get fired, or he broke into your house and stole a
television set. Maybe he's just a drunk lying in the gutter, or maybe he's a friend who embarrasses
you by picking his nose in public.

THE EGO SAYS THE PROBLEMS IN YOUR LIFE ARE "OUT THERE."
The ego's counsel is to project guilt onto him, such that if he would only change, you could
be happy. He's the culprit, and you're the victim. But wait a minute! From the chapter on Love
you learned that what you give away, you have. If you project guilt onto him, you're giving away
guilt, and it is only reinforced in you. So following the ego's advice to try to rid yourself of guilt,
you now have more, and your iceberg just got larger. So the clever ego, whose job it is to
preserve itself (its collection of ideas) has tricked you into looking for the problem where it is not,
and trying to fix it where you cannot.
However, your inner-vision sees an opportunity through forgiveness to free yourself of a
negative idea. What if, in a moment of sanity, you say, "Inner-vision, help me see this
differently."? You might hear something like this, "You are not irresponsible." If you accept and
trust that idea, thoughts may continue to flow through your conscious mind like "The irresponsible
drunk is your mirror, reflecting a time you acted irresponsibly, and didn't like yourself for it."

"HIS NEGATIVE
FOR LOVE... NOT
LOVE, BUT ALSO

BEHAVIOR IS A CALL
JUST HIS CALL FOR
YOURS."

"Forgive him, see him as whole and perfect (your inner-vision's perstpective) in spite of
appearances." (you may want to review the concept of "calling for love" at the end of the chapter
on Perception).
To see him (your mirror) differently, and old negative thought about yourself must change
(your belief that you are irresponsible). By seeing him as whole and perfect, you are extending
wholeness and perfection. By extending wholeness, and perfection, it is yours. By seeing it in him,
you are teaching it ...to yourself. By giving it, you have it.
Now this turkey, (your mirror), who at first offended you, becomes your friend because he
helped you do what you want to do more than anytbing else; that is to get rid of a little chunk of
your self-condemnation, your repressed guilt. You don't have to hug him (love takes no form or
behavior). You don't have to feed him or give him money for another bottle. You do have to see
him as whole, and appreciate him for helping you with the opportunity for forgiveness.
Three important things to remember: First, no higher power plants these turkeys in your
path. Second, the ego can't do the forgiving. Third, the turkey carries no blame. The first thought
to correct is the misconception that you are guided in some organized, pre-planned pattern.

YOU ARE NOT GUIDED BY SOME HIGHER POWER TO ANY PARTICULAR EVENT OR
CIRCUMSTANCE FOR YOUR LEARNING.
Your own mind is quite willing to accept the random happenings in your life, and search
your mental warehouse for the most suitable negative thought to eliminate through forgiveness.
Secondly, the aspect of mind that made up the grievance (the ego) cannot forgive.

YOU CAN? DO IT YOURSELF; FORGIVENESS COMES ONLY FROM YOUR INNER-VISION.

You may have heard the statement, "You must forgive yourself before you can forgive
anyone else." We need only look to the "Lord's Prayer" for a clue to how this works. "Forgive us
our debts as we forgive our debtors." You can't do it by yourself. Without the turkey there to
reflect your self, your self-condemnation would remain repressed, never to rise to the level of your
awareness, where you can now deal with it.
Third, the turkey is totally uninvolved, is not responsible, and is usually oblivious to the
whole thing.

THE CONDEMNATION AND THE FORGIVENESS ALL GO ON IN YOUR OWN MIND.

For example, we may be at a party and our friend Charlie does something considered
uncouth. You may laugh, honestly seeing only humor in it. Our friend Mary may laugh nervously
out of embarrassment, and I may be offended. So what's the message here? Well, for you, some

expression of gratitude is appropriate for he chuckle he brought into your life. (The fact that all
humor is based on pain is another issue.) For Mary and me a choice is necessary: whether to play
the culprit/victim game by condemning his actions, as ego would advise, thereby reinforcing the
iceberg, or ask our inner-vision to help us to see him differently, and thereby accomplish what we
want to do more than anything else: free ourselves of a little chunk of our own guilt that he is
reflecting.
So what's the payoff here? How does "it always result in a benefit, a blessing"?
Unfortunately, no amount of wisdom can help you understand the rela tionship between a negative
belief and a corresponding negative life experience. What I mean is that no one can say that if you
feel guilty (either consciously or not) for stealing a candy bar when you were five years old,
someone will break into your house and steal a television to teach you a lesson. Or that if you
successfully forgive the thief, a brand new television will miraculously appear on your doorstep.
And those who have been taught that the television theft is somehow a consequence of behavior in
a former life, need to search for another guru.

NO AMOUNT OF WORLDLY LOGIC CAN CORRELATE A SPECIFIC PAIN TO A GRIEVANCE OR A

SPECIFIC BLESSING TO FORGIVENESS.
When you develop a grievance against someone, there is no way to know what negative
belief, reflected in your repressed memory, will be released through forgiveness. And you cannot
know what benefits of life you have been denying yourself through negative thinking. So no one
can say that if you only give up hating yourself for fighting with your parents you will be successful
in business. Or if you stop hating Joe for scratching your new car, you will meet a beautiful soulmate and have a successful relationship. There is no question that you deny yourself the health,
wealth, and happiness that life offers freely. But there is no workable relationship between a
particular grievance and how its release will manifest in your life.

RECOMMENDING FORGIVENESS TO SOMEONE ELSE FOR SOLVING A PROBLEM IS NOT GOOD

ADVICE.
Though forgiveness is probably the only effective solution to a friend's problem, the
recommendation from you must be rejected even if they know it is right. If their state of mind
would allow them to perceive this as a solution, they would not be discussing the problem with
you. They would be listening to the guidance from their own inner-vision. Their only purpose for
complaining to others is to reinforce the whole thing in their own mind. The only helpful thing you
can do is just listen. And if you think you have an answer to their problem, it's time for a little talk
with your own inner-vision.

THE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM IS NEVER OUTSIDE THE ONE WITH THE PROBLEM.
This is not an attack on practitioners and counselors who dedicate their lives to helping
those who are hurting. I have a very high regard for professional counselors. My wife is the most
effective counselor I know, because she knows she doesn't have the answers to others problems.
But she can help by providing an atmosphere for healing. Because of her training, she's able to
guide them toward a way of thinking that allows them to see their own answer.
Let's review this whole process.
1.

You have a whole storehouse of negative thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about yourself.
These ideas (although negative) are powerful in their ability to influence your experience of
life. They block your ability to see the good and the beautiful that would contradict them.

2.

Every encounter with an "other" is an opportunity to express either gratitude or forgiveness

according to how you see them. "How you see them," or perception, is a reflection of what
is going on in your mind. They are only a trigger for your thought processes. If you like

someone and I don't, that person is innocent, and is merely reflecting a message for both
of us. It is essential for you to express gratitude to reinforce the positive and the good
awareness in your mind, and for me to express forgiveness to correct the negative.
3.

You could never deal with the whole storehouse of negative beliefs at one time; it would be
too overwhelming. So you are confronted by only those for which you are ready and able
to deal with through forgiveness. If you don't feel capable of forgiveness when it is called
for, don't worry about it; nothing is ever lost; you'll get another chance.

4.

The mind that made up the grievance (negative belief) cannot correct it. You must ask
your inner-vision (the part of your mind that knows the truth about you) to help you see it
differently. Sincerity is essential; you must be truly willing to give up the way you see it
now. The sad part is that in spite of the pain it is causing, you seldom are (because you
imagine that it requires some sacrifice - which it doesn't). But if you are willing, the most
incredible thing occurs. Your infinitely powerful mind, holding onto an indelible belief,
changes, and you see a whole new world. And the good that was blocked by that negative
belief is free to flow into your life effortlessly.

KARMA
This is an appropriate place for an explanation of what is called karma, better understood
as cause and effect. Thought attracts experience for its fulfillment. An unloving thought will
produce an instantaneous and continuous attraction of an experience for its fulfillment, and will
continue until that unloving thought is corrected. A loving thought will likewise attract an
experience after its own kind forever, because it needs no correction.
CHECKLIST

THE EXPERIENCES YOU MANUFACTURE REFLECT WHAT YOU BELIEVE.

THERE ARE ONLY TWO LOVING EXPRESSIONS OF LIFE: GRATITUDE AND FORGIVENESS!
BE ALERT FOR THE BLESSINGS THAT OCCUR IN YOUR LIFE AS OPPORTUNITIES FOR
GRATITUDE.
A SUBSTITUTE FOR LOVE LEADS AWAY FROM LOVE TOWARD ITS OPPOSITE, WHICH IS FEAR.
FORGIVENESS IS THE ONLY THING THAT CAN HEAL A SICK RELATIONSHIP.
REMEMBER, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG "OUT THERE."
FOR YOU TO GIVE UP ONE OF YOUR COLLECTION OF IDEAS WOULD CAUSE YOU TO SEE THE
WHOLE WORLD DIFFERENTLY.
FORGIVENESS DOES NOT ASK THAT YOU FORGET THAT SOMETHING HAPPENED.
ASKING THE EGO TO FORGIVE IS LIKE ASKING AN ARSONIST TO HELP PUT OUT A FIRE.

THE EGO SAYS THE PROBLEMS IN YOUR LIFE ARE "OUT THERE."
"HIS NEGATIVE BEHAVIOR IS A CALL FOR LOVE... NOT JUST HIS CALL FOR LOVE, BUT ALSO
YOURS."
YOU ARE NOT GUIDED BY SOME HIGHER POWER TO ANY PARTICULAR EVENT OR
CIRCUMSTANCE FOR YOUR LEARNING.
YOU CAN'T DO IT YOURSELF; FORGIVENESS COMES ONLY FROM YOUR INNER-VISION.
THE CONDEMNATION AND THE FORGIVENESS ALL GO ON IN YOUR OWN MIND.
THE SOLUTION TO A PROBLEM IS NEVER OUTSIDE THE ONE WITH THE PROBLEM.
NO AMOUNT OF WORLDLY LOGIC CAN CORRELATE A SPECIFIC PAIN TO A GRIEVANCE OR A
SPECIFIC BLESSING TO FORGIVENESS.
RECOMMENDING FORGIVENESS TO SOMEONE ELSE FOR SOLVING A PROBLEM IS NOT GOOD
ADVICE.

CHAPTER 8
WHOLENESS AND HEALING
Anytime something is out of harmony, a healing is called for. The cause is erroneous
thinking, the effect is disharmony, discomfort or suffering. The correc tion or healing is rightmindedness. The appearance of the effect varies considerably. It doesn't matter what form the
disharmony takes, there is only one answer and it is always the same:

DIS-HARMONY OR SUFFERING, IN ANY FORM, IS A REFLECTION OF FEAR, WHICH IS A CALL FOR

LOVE.
The body is a tool. Its purpose (like every other material thing in the world) is to
communicate who you are. You do that by your use of it . When you don't know who you are,
you will use the body to teach that you are what you are not. This misuse causes stress, as it does
with any tool that you misuse.
Depending upon how committed you are to misusing a tool, the stress can result in a
breakdown. If you insist on using a pair of pliers when the job calls for a wrench, you may break
the tool or end up with busted knuckles.

IF YOU CONTINUALLY RUN A MACHINE BEYOND ITS LIMITS, IT WILL BREAK DOWN AT ITS
WEAKEST POINT.
Let's take a look at stress. You live and grow through stress. Every action creates a stress
somewhere. You build your muscles by subjecting them to stress, and they increase in size and
strength to meet the demand. Your intelligence has increased though the stress of constant asking
and searching for knowledge. But like fire, when used properly, it can be constructive; when
misused, it can be destructive.

IT IS UNRELIEVED STRESS THAT DESTROYS.

After working hard all day, a night of restful sleep is the body's relief. When caught up in
confusion and conflict, a few moments of stillness and quiet can be a relief for the mind. However,
a constant unrelieved stress on a muscle will cause it to fatigue or cramp, and will immobilize it.
Unrelieved mental stress can be emotionally and physically immobilizing, and destroy your health,
your relationships and your creativity.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT
In a very tense situation you experience an "adrenaline rush," which at one time in the
history of man was necessary for survival. It's called the "fight or flight" response. When
confronted with a hostile, fearful, or threatening situation, certain things start to happen in the
body. Adrenaline and other hormones and chemicals are dumped into the bloodstream, which
activates a series of complex systems. Glucose is mobilized for quick energy. Metabolism
increases. Heartbeat accelerates; blood flow and volume increase. Blood pressure jumps. Body
temperature, oxygen consumption, and carbon dioxide production all increase. blood leaves the
extremities and rushes to the body core so that if a hand or foot is lost, blood loss is reduced. Feet

become cold and palms sweaty. Throat and anus constrict. Mouth becomes dry, pupils dilate,
neck and back tense up, and shoulders rise. The mind races and becomes both very alert and
paranoid. This, and much, much more was essential whenever fight or flight was called for. Only
those who were the fittest survived.

NATURE WEEDED OUT OF THE JUNGLE THOSE NOTABLE TO RESPOND TO DANGER WITH THE
FIGHT OR FLIGHT RESPONSE.
Thus you can credit your very existence today to the fact that your ancestors were among
the fittest. You inherited a very finely tuned, highly complex sys tem of behavior designed for
survival in a jungle. Un-fortunately, the very mechanism which at one time ensured your health
and well being is now destroying it. Few of us have life-threatening experiences that would justify
the fight or flight response. And although the daily encounters of conflict produce the physical
preparedness for fight or flight, society does not allow that to happen (it is not acceptable to either
fight or run in the office), and it remains bottled up in you as unrelieved stress. In fact your system
misinterprets your inaction as lack of preparedness, and increases the dosage in an increasingly
destructive spiral.
Only strenuous exercise can purge the body of the residue from the hormones released
during conflict and perceived attack. But in a day's work you may have many conflicts that you
must just sit and take. So you add caffeine, nicotine, aspirin, Valium, and alcohol to relieve the
effects. When the hormones released during the fight or flight response are not expelled from the
body through strenuous exercise, the residue collects at the joints, causing stiffness. Imagine the
number of times during a workday you experience a tense or threatening situation multiplied by
the number of days in a year. Could this help to explain why over 50 million people in the United
States suffer from Rheumatoid Arthritis, beginning at an average age of 35 years? It is not yet,
however, on the increasing list of stress-related or psychosomatic disorders which today make up
50 to 80 percent of our diseases.
Why do some people succumb to an epidemic of an infectious disease, while others don't?
We all have potentially dangerous germs in our bodies all the time which are rendered harmless by
a very complicated and effective immune system. There are a lot of unknowns about our immune
system, but one thing scientists are finding out is that its effectiveness is hampered by stress. And,
like a machine that works fine normally, under too much stress the body will break down at its
weakest point. Research on animals shown that various forms and intensities of stress have
enhanced their susceptibility to neoplastic disorders (such as cancer) and viral infection. This may
explain why students frequently get colds at exam time, and why someone who has been in long
term cancer remission could experience a recurrence after a tragic (extreme stress-producing)
experience.
Here it is essential to remember that it is not what happens in your life that causes the
experience of stress. But rather it is your perception of what is hap pening. A relatively minor
normal occurrence, like a traffic jam, may have no adverse effects on one person and be extremely
disturbing to another.
Nature weeded out of the jungle those not able to respond to conflict with instant fear and
paranoia (fight or flight).

ONCE AGAIN, NATURE IS WEEDING OUT OF THE MODERN JUNGLE THOSE NOTABLE TO
RESPOND TO CONFLICT WITH INSTANT UNDERSTANDING, HARMONY, AND LOVE.
The cure for unrelieved stress is prevention. Remember that perception is a wish fulfilled.
You see what you want to be there, you then respond as if it were real. First establish clearly that
your only desire is to teach love, which results in experiences of peace, joy, and harmony. Then

enter into each activity with that desire as your goal, measuring each success against no other
yardstick. See criticism as a call for love.

SEE ANGER AS A FORM OF FEAR THAT WILL VANISH IN THE PRESENCE OF LOVE.
Don't get me wrong - if you perceive someone's behavior as an attack, you had better react
accordingly. But if you can truly see it for what it is, a call for love, you can be guided to the
appropriate expression of love which will cause the fear that it represents to immediately
disappear.

MEDITATION
Relief from mental and emotional stress can most effectively occur through meditation. I
don't mean doing some cult thing on a mountain top with your legs crossed. I mean devoting
some time daily to restoring your mental and emotional energy, the same way you devote time
each night to restoring your physical energy. Sleep itself is not enough for relief of mental and
emotional stress. You frequently wake up with the same fears and anxieties you went to bed with.
There are many techniques for effective meditation but the same four elements exist in
most all of them.
1.

A quiet atmosphere, free from disturbance.

2.

A comfortable position, NOT lying down.

3.

A passive attitude or feeling of letting go.

4.

An idea upon which to dwell (such as peace or harmony)

A frequent comment I hear is, "I don't have time to meditate." Well, my dad taught me
how to farm. Every time he'd hook a piece of equipment to the trac tor, he'd give it a generous
going over with the grease gun, then he'd always say, "Son, grease don't cost money, it saves
money."

MEDITATION DOESN'T TAKE TIME, IT SAVES TIME.

When you've established clearly that your desire is peace, harmony, joy, and love, all those
excuses will drop away. Until then, you'll go on fighting your way through life, a victim of the
world. You always find the time and means for something you really want. So when you can't find
the time or means, the real problem is that, for some reason, you don't want the goal.
Now it is important to make a distinction between the word PAIN and the word SUFFER.
Pain is what occurs when you stub you toe on a chair that some one left in the middle of a dark
room. Suffering occurs when you complain and whine about the pain and seek to place blame for
it happening.
Pain is a good thing, it tells us when there is a malfunction in the system and that a
correction is needed. Suffering, however, is what destroys peace of mind.

A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PAIN IS INEVITABLE, BUT SUFFERING IS OPTIONAL.

The purpose of this manual is not to prevent the occurrence of pain, but to provide tools
that can free you of your suffering. And if your purpose for study ing this manual is to free yourself
of a particular pain, you will probably be disappointed, although it could be the result. If this
statement doesn't make much sense now, make a note to look at it again when you have finished
the chapter.

YOU WILL BE FREE OF SUFFERING WHEN YOU NO LONGER SEE A BENEFIT IN IT.
How is it possible for anyone to see a benefit in suffering? Imagine that I find myself in a
difficult situation, and can find no way to resolve it. It may seem like nothing to you from the
outside where you can see more clearly, but for me it is overwhelming, with no relief in sight.
Now, throughout life I have been taught a long list of escape routes beginning with alcohol and
tranquilizers, including many forms of illness, and, of course, the ultimate escape route: suicide. So
I subconsciously choose a painful but effective way out. The most obvious might be an ulcer flareup, an asthma attack, or a migraine headache. If this seems illogical, maybe you've never been
there.
Remember, fear has no logic. Whatever incapacitation results is OK because it frees me of
the responsibility which weighs so heavily at the time. Now my boss, my family, (and even I)
expect less of me, and modify their demands accordingly. Illness has postponed or maybe even
prevented confrontation with what appears to me to be the impossible. Unfortunately, what works
effectively once can tend to become a pattern or even a way of life. Suffering is an attempt to
create some value from pain. I guess the worlds teaching No pain, no gain has had its effect.

HEALING OCCURS WHEN YOU SEE NO VALUE IN PAIN.

But now wait a minute! If youre really suffering, and I say youre suffering because you
want to be, you must disagree, and even discredit everything else I say. That would render this
message meaningless. It is totally ineffective for me to tell you when you are drowning, that its
just an illusion or that you are there because you want to be.

FOR YOU TO ACCEPT THESE IDEAS, YOU MUST AVOID APPLYING THEM TO A SPECIFIC PROBLEM
YOU NOW HAVE.
Because you cant perceive your immediate problem objectively, you must reject these
ideas. If however you can accept these ideas about someone else, they will become part of you,
and you will positively affect your own condition. But remember, when we speak of healing, we
refer to healing and suffering, not necessarily the pain.
Even if you can intellectualize responsibility for your suffering, you are demonstrating lack
of conviction by your experience. You have given permission for the mind to be controlled by an
outside effect. You are saying that here is a piece of matter that has control over your mind. It is
giving to the body the power to make decisions. It is your misuse of mind that has put an
intolerable stress on the body, causing the malfunction. It is through correction of erroneous
thinking, restoration of right-mindedness, that suffering is relieved.

SUFFERING REFLECTS A PURPOSE OF WANTING TO PROVE THAT YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE NOT

The purpose of suffering is to try to prove that you are a body, alone in life, separated from
everyone else; to prove that you are guilty, and that this is appropriate punishment. Suffering is an
attempt to find strength in weakness. You do experience a power over others that you don't have
when you are healthy and happy. Because the body isn't functioning well, others must do your
work for you, maybe care for you, etc. It is giving the body power. In the ego's thinking, suffering
stands for power. Healing would be a repudiation of all that suffering stands for,, and therefore
healing appears to be your enemy.
We could go on with many theories on why we choose suffering, but in a larger sense, the
purpose of suffering is irrelevant. We simply cannot know why in this dance that we made up we
chose particular steps of fear, separation, and immobility.
Let's pause here for a moment. If you are trying to accept these ideas, and at the same
time are experiencing an overwhelming problem in your life, you must be having a lot of conflict in
your mind. Maybe you're even feeling guilty for not being able to correct something terribly
distressing.
First, be aware that it is a trick of the ego to take anything (even a concept of healing) and
generate guilt feelings for its own survival. That's why I said you can't apply these ideas directly to
a problem you're having right now. Next, remember that the purpose of this manual is not to
change anything in the world, although this can be the result. Finally, understand that even
though the appearance of some things may never change in your lifetime, your inner vision can
allow you to see them from a totally different perspective that will truly bring peace of mind.

PREOCCUPATION WITH AN EFFECT GIVES IT POWER AND ENHANCES THE ERROR.

Suffering or distress in any form is just an effect. Awareness that the cause itself (fear) has
no power or reality, other than that which you give to it, demon strates how inefficient it is to try to
make correction on the level of the effect.
HEALING REFLECTS A PURPOSE OF WANTING TO PROVE THAT YOUARE WHAT YOUARE. LOVE.
At this point, let's remember that healing applies not only to suffering, but to disharmony in
any form. Disharmony is a reflection of fear - a call for love. just as darkness cannot exist in the
presence of light, fear cannot exist in the presence of love.

YOUR REALITY IS LOVE, SO WHEN YOU TEACH FEAR, YOU ARE MISUSING YOUR
COMMUNICATION TOOL.
To the degree you insist on teaching that you are what you are not, the stress of misuse
must cause a breakdown. The correction of disharmony in any part of your life is simply to change
your purpose for that part of your life.
The first step is to realize that your conscious mind can't do this. It is your conscious mind
that made up the premise that you are a body. The second step is to ask your inner-vision to help
you see it differently. This will initiate the change of mind (premise), from within that will literally
cause you to see it differently. The third step is to do nothing, recognizing that the success
depends not upon anything you do, but entirely upo n the sincerity of your desire.
Why would sincerity be a problem? If you are in suffering, would not a desire for healing be
sincere? Remember, the thought that causes the problem is "buying" you something. Although
the thinking is erroneous (and hence the resulting problem), it is precious to you, and giving it up
must appear to result in a loss. Like the drunk who would like to be cured of the hangover but not
of the drinking, you might desire freedom from the suffering (effect) without having to change the

thinking (cause).
When you see your reality as a body, as guilty, as separate, and as incomplete, you will
give your body the purpose of proving (teaching) that these things are true. But these things are
not true, and so this is a misuse of the body as a communication tool. Now having asked to see it
differently, and your mind being changed about it, with your new perspective, you are quite willing
to give a new purpose to it. Then you let your new purpose guide your choices.
Here is a paradox that must be understood to avoid confusion and disillusionment. Healing
of a specific problem cannot be the reason for requesting to see your reality differently, ... although
it can be the result.

PHYSICAL HEALING IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR WHOLENESS.

If you ask most folks what they would want more than anything else, the answer would
most likely be good physical health. That certainly is normal, but it sure does illustrate the world's
teaching that you are a body, and that your greatest concerns are for the body's pleasures (or
freedom from pain). When you follow the world's guidance and seek healing of a specific problem,
you will spend a lifetime fixing one effect after another, never considering the cause. Healing is an
exercise, invented by man to overcome a condition called sickness, invented by man. When you
seek for and find an awareness of wholeness (an aspect of love), healing is the natural result. You
will see this paradox repeated in the chapters on relationships and prosperity. Because the
problem is the same in every area of life, the solution is always the same.

WHEN SOMETHING IS NOT WORKING, DON? BE DISTRACTED BY TRYING TO FIX IT; INSTEAD,
CHANGE YOUR PURPOSE FOR IT.
When your purpose for anything is to assist you in your effort to teach love, it won't need
fixing. When you have decided that something needs fixing "out there," if you sincerely ask to see
it differently, your experience will soon be that it doesn't need fixing.
A short time back while I was clearing some ground for a golf course on our 44 acre farm, I
ran over an old stump with my tractor. A hive of bees hav ing its home destroyed was somewhat
upset at me, and felt the need to show me the error of my ways. In the middle of the stinging and
flailing of arms, I began to laugh at myself. Swatting at the places on my neck, arms and back
where I had been stung kept me fromcalmly putting the tractor in high gear and getting out of
there. By the time I had felt the sting, the cause of the pain was history (in the past). So I
realized that I was preoccupied with swatting at the past, distracting myself from appropriate
action in the now to avoid any further pain.
When you are totally committed to healing, you will teach only love. And the key to love is
forgiveness.

THAT FORGIVENESS IS HEALING CANNOT BE OVER-EMPHASIZED.

As the opposite of love is fear, so only fear can be the reason to withhold forgiveness. Only
terminal ignorance of its purpose, process, and blessing could dissuade you from using your power
of forgiveness. If I have pressed the point enough, let me explain how it works.
Remember, you only have what you give away. The most debilitating belief in the world is
that you are guilty. It matters not whether you are; the belief that you are guilty is motivation for
self punishment and, in the extreme, self destruction.
Imagine with me that you have ten units of guilt. A couple from Bible stories about Adam.

A couple because you never met your parents' expectations or be cause you resent your parents
for not providing you with a college education. At least two or three units relating to sexual
activity. One or two for stealing or cheating on your taxes. It doesn't even have to be anything
you've done wrong. It may be a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of being unworthy, or just an
unacceptance of self.
Come to think of it, ten units won't be near enough. There are hundreds or thousands of
units in various sizes and intensities, each like a virus attack ing one or another area of your life.
One effect may appear as a problem with your back, faltering under the weight of guilt. Another
may sabotage your personal creativity keeping you from doing something praise-worthy. Still
another unit of guilt creating an expensive crisis every time you get a little money saved up. And
yet another which always comes up with conflict when a relationship becomes too important or too
close for comfort.
This is a science in general, but in specific application, it is an art. There is no way to tie
together the negative belief with a particular problem in life. But you are not helpless. The
negative beliefs show themselves daily, and somewhat in their order of importance to you. The
trick is to recognize them because they appear to you through other people, and in a form you
cannot easily accept as relating to yourself.

THE WORLD IS A MIRROR, PEOPLED BY REFLECTIONS Of ME.

Whenever someone appears with a behavior you could criticize or condemn, it is reflecting
something you don't like about yourself. To free them of your condemnation requires that you
change your mind about a belief you hold about yourself, and you then see them differently. That
is forgiveness. But you can't do it. You (your ego) are the one who made the perception that you
can so easily criticize. So in a moment of sanity, you ask your inner-vision (the voice for love) to
help you see this differently. That is from the perspective of love. Your inner-vision will instantly
provide you with a new way to think about it (a change of mind). If you honestly want
forgiveness, and don't reject the thought, then you will effortlessly see it differently.
Remember, you only have what you give away. Giving,and having are the same. Giving and
receiving are one. What you have just given away (forgiveness) is yours, and you have just done
what you want to do more than anything else in the world: freed yourself of one or two units of
guilt.

THE PAIN AND TROUBLE MANIFESTED BY GUILT IN YOUR LIFE HAS NO MORE CAUSE TO EXIST.
In a cause and effect relationship, where belief in guilt is the cause and self-punishing
behavior is the effect, when the cause is removed the effect must cease to manifest.
A common question is "How can I initiate these belief changes without waiting for a conflict
to show the need?" There is a process of daily practice guar anteed to provide the peace you seek.
Each morning when you awake. Declare,

"MY PURPOSE FOR TODAY IS A GREATER AWARENESS OF MY REALITY WHICH IS LOVE."

Then at some time each day take a few quiet minutes and ask "Inner-vision, what in my life
would I like to see differently?" The first thought that comes to mind that represents a complaint,
problem, or grievnce is the one to use. Then say "Inner-vision, help me see it differently." The
first day when nothing comes to mind that your would like to see differently, you are at peace.
Now you may say, "I understand that but..." Sorry, my friend, understanding without peace
is not understanding.

How's that for a kick in the "but"?

A Personal Story
In the fall of 1983 I was "blessed" with the opportunity to serve on jury duty. In the past I
had always been successful in finding ways to be excused from this despicable exercise. For you
conscientious freedom lovers who enjoy jury duty, you may not understand when I say that if I
were accused of something, I would hate to put my life in the hands of twelve honest people who
don't know even enough to get off jury duty. This time, someone was convinced that I should not
be denied participation in the American justice system, so one bright morning I found myself
among 'em in the courthouse library.
I noted that those who shared aloud in the chitchat without exception complained of the
inconvenience and even hardship that this opportunity had bestowed upon them. Then twelve
names were called, and shortly we were sitting as a group in the jury box being interviewed by two
attorneys. The story presented was that a man had somehow caused harm to a woman's
property, and she felt $30,000 would make things right (the bulk of which was, I think, for
emotional stress). Now the questions presented to each potential juror related to their qualifications
to make a judgment about this matter. I was amazed to hear that these folks who had dozens of
reasons why they wanted to be somewhere else were totally bent on proving that they were
qualified to be there, and on not being rejected from jury duty.
When it came my turn to respond, I explained to the attorneys that I taught a discipline
that says, "Teach no one that they have ever hurt you," and that when one feels that they have
been harmed by another, all that is called for is forgiveness. This was my first experience of what
must be called a pregnant silence. After exchanging a few glances with the attorneys, the judge
declared, "Sir, you are excused." In the many years since, they have not felt the need for my
presence.
Now my experience has been that when we make a firm declaration, the universe has ways
of testing to see if we really mean it. And so began the most profound experience of my life.
In January of 1984, my wife and I left for South Africa and two months of lectures and
seminars on "A Course in Miracles." (The copyright owner of "A Course in Miracles" is The
Foundation for Inner Peace) It was a phenomenal encounter with thousands of beautiful people
worthy of a book itself. But this is about what happened upon our return to the United States. As
we were driving away from the airport, we were greeted by an elderly gentleman (whom we'll call
Mr. Brown) driving across our intersection against a red light. The result was damaging to both
vehicles and painful to the occupants. My wife's discomfort was substantial but only temporary.
And Mr. Brown's problems were minor but I was dubiously blessed with the discovery that whiplash
is more than just a state of mind.
Looking back on the experience, I realize that it was a classic encounter, and could not
have unfolded more perfectly. While we were clearing the vehicles from the intersection, a man
came running across the street and said, "I saw it all! He ran the red light. Here's my name and
address." Normally we'd search high and low gathering witnesses to our role as victims. A
policeman arrived immediately, talked to the witness and cited Mr. Brown for running the red light
and causing a traffic accident. Seldom do we enjoy such incontrovertible proof that we are a victim
and that the other person is guilty.
I had for over ten years suffered from the very common lower back pain syndrome.
Numerous visits to doctors resulted in the normal advice to lose weight, exercise, and correct my
posture (all of which I ignored). The problem progressed to such a degree that standing to present
a lecture for twenty minutes would result in tremendous pain in my lower back and left leg.
In addition to the whiplash, something got jarred in my mid-back and the lower back problem was
aggravated. For three straight weeks while our local friendly chiropractor jumped all over my body,

I endured considerable pain alternating from my midback to my lower back to my neck which, the
whole time, was adorned with one of those embarrassing soft neck collars (embarrassing because I
had always laughed at people wearing them).
Now this very nice lady from Mr. Brown's insurance company, which had already paid me
considerably more for the car than it was worth, wanted to visit our home and discuss the personal
injury claim. Seeing her approach the house, I removed the neck brace and invited her in. She
carried a clipboard with some budgeting forms. She explained that her company would like to try
to estimate how much they should budget for the settlement of this claim, and would like to ask a
few questions. Now I knew that she knew that I was three weeks into considerable pain, loss of
time, expenses, etc. And with no question of who was guilty, we could be talking big bucks here.
So the questions went something like, "How much pain was I having?" and, "How long did I expect
to be needing health care?" This translated into: the more pain, the more bucks and the longer I'm
disabled, the more bucks.
Then this persistent little voice in my head started ip with nonsense like, "Teach no one that
they have giver hurt you," "No one is guilty," "What are you reaching with this use of money?" and
"What are you ising your body to teach?" I tried to explain to this lice lady the conflict I was having
between this and what I taught in my lectures. It must have sounded strange as her demeanor
changed, reflecting that she vas sure the accident had caused more than just physical damage.
Her next offering clinched it, "Well, et me just say that my company's purpose is to make you
whole." Of all the words to help free me of my :onflict, that was not it! She continued, "And
besides, Mr. Brown feels very guilty about what he caused, and our payment to you will help him to
feel better about t." THAT DID IT! I'm convinced that the persistent little voice in my head has
agents on the outside. How could she know the right buzz words and just how to use them? I had
to ask this very nice lady to give me some time to think about it, and that I would be in touch. She
exited graciously, knowing that I was thinking "big lawsuit."
Well, I didn't sleep that night. I tossed and turned, "wrestling with angels" over what I
knew I had to do and the potential sacrifice of quite a bit of money. But at 5 a.m. I arose and
typed a letter to this nice lady relieving her company of any and all liability relative to the incident.
And a second letter to Mr. Brown advising him that everyone in my family was fine as I hoped he
was, and that I appreciated having met him. I went to town that afternoon and drove around the
post office about five times before taking a deep breath and dropping the letters in the mail box.
That night, as I recall, slept pretty well. The next morning I arose to find that all the pain
was gone. That's right: the neck pain, the mid-back pain, and the lower back problem that had
been getting worse for ten years - gone. That was over eight years ago, and the pain has never
returned.
So what does it all mean? Obviously, everyone will apply to it their own meaning, but I
hope this much is exceedingly clear: forgiveness is healing. Forgiveness, for me, is always difficult,
appearing to ask for sacrifice but never does, and always holds a blessing.
CHECKLIST

DIS-HARMONY OR SUFFERING, IN ANY FORM, IS A REFLECTION OF FEAR, WHICH IS A CALL FOR

LOVE.
IF YOU CONTINUALLY RUN A MACHINE BEYOND ITS LIMITS, IT WILL BREAK DOWN AT ITS
WEAKEST POINT.
IT IS UNRELIEVED STRESS THAT DESTROYS.

NATURE WEEDED OUT OF THE JUNGLE THOSE NOTABLE TO RESPOND TO DANGER WITH THE
FIGHT OR FLIGHT RESPONSE.
ONCE AGAIN, NATURE IS WEEDING OUT OF THE MODERN JUNGLE THOSE NOTABLE TO
RESPOND TO CONFLICT WITH INSTANT UNDERSTANDING, HARMONY, AND LOVE.
SEE ANGER AS A FORM OF FEAR THAT WILL VANISH IN THE PRESENCE OF LOVE. MEDITATION
DOESN'T TAKE TIME, IT SAVES TIME.
A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF PAIN IS INEVITABLE, BUT SUFFERING IS OPTIONAL.
YOU WILL BE FREE OF SUFFERING WHEN YOU NO LONGER SEE A BENEFIT IN IT.
HEALING OCCURS WHEN YOU SEE NO VALUE IN PAIN.
FOR YOU TO ACCEPT THESE IDEAS, YOU MUST AVOID APPLYING THEM TO A SPECIFIC PROBLEM
YOU NOW HAVE.
SUFFERING REFLECTS A PURPOSE OF WANTING TO PROVE THAT YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE NOT.
PREOCCUPATION WITH AN EFFECT GIVES IT POWER AND ENHANCES THE ERROR.
HEALING REFLECTS A PURPOSE OF WANTING TO PROVE THAT YO U ARE WHAT YOU ARE: LOVE.
YOUR REALITY IS LOVE, SO WHEN YOU TEACH FEAR, YOU ARE MISUSING YOUR
COMMUNICATION TOOLS.
PHYSICAL HEALING IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR WHOLENESS.
WHEN SOMETHING IS NOT WORKING, DON'T BE DISTRACTED BY TRYING TO FIX IT; INSTEAD,
CHANGE YOUR PURPOSE FOR IT.
THAT FORGIVENESS IS HEALING CANNOT BE OVER-EMPHASIZED.
THE WORLD IS A MIRROR, PEOPLED BY REFLECTIONS OF ME.
THE PAIN AND TROUBLE MANIFESTED BY GUILT IN YOUR LIFE HAS NO MORE CAUSE TO EXIST.
"MY PURPOSE FOR TODAY IS A GREATER AWARENESS OF MY REALITY WHICH IS LOVE."

CHAPTER 9
LOVE AND ROMANCE
One of your greatest yearnings in life is to experience and express love. The world, bent on
protecting you from your reality, provides you with romantic ex periences and calls it love.
Romance is great. It can provide you with unexplainable pleasure. When it sours, however, it can
be the source of excruciating pain, and when that occurs, you blame it on love.

ROMANCE IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR LOVE.

A word of caution: the distinction between love and romance is not going to be easy for
most people to understand and accept. Let's try it this way. Imagine with me that you and I are
out on the town, all dressed up in our finest rags (costumes, war paint, and shiny bangles designed
to attract attention). It's "Some Enchanted Evening," across a crowded room, and our eyes meet.
Instant attraction! With my body prepared for fight or flight, I commence my charge with visions
of other than sugarplums dancing in my head. With your heart beating a little faster as I approach,
you wonder what took this "molasses for brains" so long to catch the signals you had been sending
him for an hour and a half.
So as I invade your space, I turn on my macho, and you play it cool (although you'd rather
go for instant playtime, the rules say you must act like Miss Frigidaire). So with all the suave I can
muster, I hit you with my very best line (sorry, it's classified). Let's just say that over the clamor of
the rock music I shout, "What's your sign?" And as you slowly reach into your purse for a barf bag,
wondering why you always attract nerds, you reply like syrup, "Oh, are you into astrology too?"
Then I offer to buy you a drink (which you suspect I'll try to pay for with food stamps).
Thus begins what is called a beautiful "love affair," which in truth is a romance, a living
dream, a fantasy. Romance is great- it's the dance that includes infatu ation, lots of compliments,
candy and flowers, picnics in the park, moonlight strolls, lots of kissing, and occasional skin-to-skin
body contact.
I tell you how beautiful you are and how I like the way the light falls on your hair. You
remark that you didn't know they could make sport coats to accom modate such big shoulders and
how much you like my gold chain. Then if we "make it through the night," we enter the golden era
of romance. Watching the clock till we can be "together again," with secret code names for each
other and constant phone calls that begin with, "Hi, it's me." Each of us can do no wrong. We
have deep philosophical discussions and make impossible promises at 3:00 am over milkshakes
and onion rings, and everything we do,, we do together.

WHEN TWO PEOPLE ARE HOPELESSLY EMBROILED IN ROMANCE, THE WORLD DECLARES THAT
THEY ARE "IN LOVE."
But let's look closer. Remember me? I'm the guy with a mountain of guilt and negative
feelings from which I so desperately want to be free, because of the believed consequences of the
imagirned guilt. Furthermore, the world has taught me that there are two ways to get rid of guilt,
(neither of which work): first, repress it, put it out of my mind - push it down to the lower part of
the iceberg, below the level of awareness. Second, if some turkey comes along and makes me
aware of it again, project it on to him. He becomes the guilty one and I become the victim.
If I enter this relationship for what I can get out of it (which we all do, initially), the most
valuable thing you can do for me is help me repress my guilt. The golden era of romance does this
perfectly. You make me feel happy and carefree. Songs constantly go through my mind such as,

"Close To You" and "You Light Up My Life. You work better than a double Valium. You make me
feel good about myself. You protect me from my guilty feelings.
There are two problems with this.

WHAT YOU PROTECT ME FROM, IN MY SUB_CONSCIOUS, YOU HAVE BECOME THE SYMBOL
FOR.
On that level, I hate you because you are a constant reminder of that from which I want
to be free.

IM NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU; RATHER, IM IN LOVE WITH YOUR ABILITY TO KEEP ME FEELING
GOOD ABOUT MYSELF.
I assign to you the responsibility for my happiness. The romance lasts as long as you can
succeed, and you do your very best, but the world out there is always looking for ways to remind
me what a rat I am. I have become dependent upon you for my happiness. Dependency breeds
contempt. So if Im not happy, I conclude that it must be your fault. In a young relationship,
problems with money are very effective to reveal a mans inadequacy and worthlessness. The
result is I become depressed and unhappy and I attack you because, after all, you are the one
who is supposed to keep me happy. From the worlds point of view, this is when love changes to
hate, but love cant change into anything else.

ROMANCE CAN QUICKLY TURN TO HATRED WHEN IT IS BASED ON A GIVE TO GET

RELATIONSHIP.
The give to get idea means simply, I will say nice things to you and feed your needy
ego as long as you fulfill my needs. This condition is terminal romance and can only end in
disaster, unless we change the purpose for our relationship.
The end usually begins like this. After a sleepless night, over breakfast, you say to me,
Can we talk? Now Ive seen this coming for a long time so I know what's going down. Besides,
I have a few choice comments I've been saving up, too. The first salvo is something like, "What's
wrong with you?" And I respond with, "What do you mean, what's wrong with me? I've been
wondering what's wrong with you!"
At this point, it doesn't matter who's talking, the message for both is the same. Where
you used to serve the world's purpose of helping me repress my guilt feelings, you have now
failed and have been elected to serve the world's purpose of being the one upon whom I project
my guilt. You are the culprit and I am the victim. Where you used to be the source of my
happiness, you now are the reason I am unhappy.
You say, "You used to be so kind and considerate, so loving and supportive, and now look
at you!" and I blast back with, "But you're the one who's changed, what happened to you?" Then
the specifics come out. It's as though the long range artillery barrage is over, and it's time for the
hand-to-hand combat. You say, "You never mow the lawn anymore." I say, "You don't keep the
house cleaned up like you used to." You say, "You don't take the garbage out." Then with a
triumphant smirk I reply, "You cooked it, you take it out!"
In the closing arguments we shift to the strategy that a strong defense is the best offense.
You open with, "Where have I failed? I tried so hard to..." I counter with, "No, no - it's not your
fault; I should never have..." and we end the roller coaster ride back in the sack.
Is that sad, or what? My friend, that's not love, that's romance, and as soon as one of us

get's tired of this little game, the love song becomes "Please Re lease Me." If I'm not able to
change you into someone who can always make me happy (which is, of course, impossible), the
ego says, "Another can be found." So I rejoin the dance of the desperates in search of a
"meaningful relationship." This time I'll try to find someone who understands me and, of course,
younger too, while you undoubtedly end up humming Peggy Lee's old song, "Love, You Didn't Do
Right by Me."
The solution to this is simple but not easy (and it's the same solution to problems in every
area of your life). Healing of a specific problem "out there" cannot be the reason for requesting to
see your experiences differently, although it can be the result. If you focus on the problem, you
will spend a lifetime trying to heal your relationships again and again. Why spend time "fixing"
something, just so you can go back to using it in the same manner that caused it to break?
Besides, when you get tired of it you will abandon it for another and another, all the time
desperately trying to find love.

WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT LOVE IS WHO YOU ARE, HARMONIOUS RELATIONSHIPS FOLLOW
NATURALLY.
The relationship you are in right now is the best tool imaginable. To do this you simply
change the purpose of your relationship. You enter every relationship initially looking for what
you can get out of it. Because you believe that you are incomplete, you seek wholeness. The ego
urges you to seek for what you want outside yourself. The purpose used to be to get your
happiness and your wholeness from the other person, and this you can never do, because your
wholeness is not in the other person. It is never "out there"; it can only be found within.
So change the purpose of the relationship from one in which you try to find your
wholeness in the other to one in which you share your wholeness with the other. Now you will
think in terms of what you can give to the relationship, and if you're thinking about what a great
body you have to give, forget it! Relationships are not of the body, they are of the mind. The
amount of wholeness or happiness that you can get from another is very limited (if any at all);
you can only give wholeness in a relationship.

THE AMOUNT OF WHOLENESS YOU CAN GIVE TO A RELATIONSHIP IS UNLIMITED.

And remember? Whatever you give, you have! You can only have by giving. The result is
you find your wholeness within by giving it to another. You find it in yourself as you give it away,
but how do you give away wholeness?

IN THE CONTEXT OF WHOLENESS, SEEING (PERCEPTION), TEACHING, AND GIVING ARE ALL
THE SAME.
If I can see you as OK, or whole, I am teaching that you are whole (to me); I am giving
you wholeness. What I teach, I learn. What I give, I have, but there are always some behaviors
that I can accept and some that I cannot. So whenever I see something that I like or admire, I
must think, feel, and express gratitude. Whenever I see something other than that, I must ask
my inner-vision to help me see it differently - the first step in the process of forgiveness.
Now I can almost hear you say, "Wait a minute! Am I supposed to forgive everything that
everyone wants to do to me?" No. If you perceive that some one is going to attack you either
physically or verbally, you'd better defend yourself (because you are in a state of fear). But if, in
a moment of sanity, you can remember the chapter on forgiveness, it might become clear that:

IF YOU BECOME OFFENDED OR DEFENSIVE AT SOMEONE'S COMMENT, THEY HAVE JUST

PUSHED ONE OF YOUR HOT BUTTONS.
They've just brought a little chunk of your iceberg of guilt (from where it was safely
repressed in your subconscious) up into your awareness. You now must choose whether to free
yourself of it through forgiveness or reinforce it through projection onto them.
Time for another "wait a minute"? Are you wondering how a thug attacking you could
reflect something you don't like about yourself? Remember, don't be fooled by the form the
world is reflecting. Do you remember how kids are best friends one day and worst enemies the
next? Maybe at 10 years old you told your best friend (in anger), "I wish you were dead!" Or
maybe at some point you have avoided someone, wishing they were out of your life. These are
murderous thoughts and inevitably result in guilty feelings which, over time, you have successfully
forgotten (repressed). And here is why Jesus said "Love your enemies."

WHEN SOMEONE REALLY PUSHES YOUR HOT BUTTON, THEY'RE NOT DOING IT AGAINST YOU,
BUT FOR YOU.
How thankful you should be for your dear loving friends who devote so much time and
energy, and sometimes endure so much pain, just to help you learn. So what if you don't do it
right? What if you're not ready to forgive this one? No problem:

NO OPPORTUNITY FOR FORGIVENESS IS EVER LOST; YOU'LL GET ANOTHER CHANCE.

Because a particular problem has come into your awareness, it is one you are ready to
deal with and it will come around again. There is, however, no use saying, "I see my error and I'll
be ready for it when it comes around next time. " Next time, the same "fear thought" that is
awaiting forgiveness will be disguised in a different form. It's never easy.
CHECKLIST

ROMANCE IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR LOVE.

THE AMOUNT OF WHOLENESS YOU CAN GIVE TO A RELATIONSHIP IS UNLIMITED.
WHEN TWO PEOPLE ARE HOPELESSLY EMBROILED IN ROMANCE, THE WORLD DECLARES THAT
THEYARE "IN LOVE."
WHAT YOU PROTECT ME FROM, IN MY SUB-CONSCIOUS, YOU HAVE BECOME THE SYMBOL
FOR.
I'M NOT IN LOVE WITH YOU; RATHER, I'M IN LOVE WITH YOUR ABILITY TO KEEP ME FEELING
GOOD ABOUT MYSELF
IN THE CONTEXT OF WHOLENESS, SEEING (PERCEPTION), TEACHING. AND GIVING ARE ALL
THE SAME.

IF YOU BECOME OFFENDED OR DEFENSIVE AT SOMEONE'S COMMENT, THEY HAVE JUST

PUSHED ONE OF YOUR HOT BUTTONS.
ROMANCE CAN QUICKLY TURN TO HATRED WHEN IT IS BASED ON A "GIVE TO GET"
RELATIONSHIP.
WHEN SOMEONE REALLY PUSHES YOUR HOT BUTTON, THEY'RE NOT DOING IT AGAINST YOU,
BUT FOR YOU.
WHEN YOU REALIZE THAT LOVE IS WHO YOUARE, HARMONIOUS RELATIONSHIP FOLLOW
NATURALLY
NO OPPORTUNITY FOR FORGIVENESS IS EVER LOST; YOU'LL GET ANOTHER CHANCE.

CHAPTER 10
PROSPERITY AND RICHES
There is an absolute difference between prosperity and worldly riches, yet because they
are also related, it's not easy for most people to see a clear distinction. For the same reason,
some folks couple together love and romance or belief and truth. In the same way that:
1.

belief is a substitute for truth, and

2.

physical health is a substitute for wholeness, and

3.

romance is a substitute for love

RICHES ARE A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROSPERITY.

There is nothing wrong with any of these substitutes except that if, in the pursuit of the
real thing yousettle for the substitute, it's easy to be disappointed. This discrepancy is easy to
understand but very difficult to prove, because people who don't know what love is are convinced
that romance is what they are looking for. The world helps you find romance and steers you
away from love. The world fills you with beliefs and hides the truth from you in a place where
you would never think to look: within. The world makes riches easy to attain and lose while
blatantly denying you prosperity.
I suspect that if you are hearing all this for the first time, it must seem like just a bunch of
words - a little crazy at worst and an impossible dream at best. It sometimes seems that the
purpose of the world's language is to confuse, and to define a word in the world's terms obscures
its true meaning. For example, prosperity is defined as success and good fortune. Nothing could
be further from the truth! I have heard very wealthy, successful people declare that they never
felt truly prosperous. Success and wealth can be obtained through the world's guidance, and
there is nothing wrong with that, but this is not and can not be expected to result in a feeling of
prosperity.

PROSPERITY IS A FEELING THAT RESULTS FROM HIGH SELF-ESTEEM!

Low self-esteem equates to unacceptance of self, which results from the sense of guilt
taught by the world. The world teaches you to devote your life to gaining riches, which it says is
prosperity, and the result will be high self-esteem. Fortunately, you need only look at the world's
teaching, and reverse it for right-mindedness:

HIGH SELF-ESTEEM COMES ONLY FROM A GREATER AWARENESS OF YOUR REALITY, WHICH IS
LOVE.
High self-esteem simply means feeling good about yourself and seeing yourself as
acceptable, even worthwhile. One who has a sense of high self esteem is truly prosperous and
the experience of success and good fortune is the natural result. The reverse is not true.
Think of times when you felt really good about yourself. Although you may not have been

rich, you felt no real lack. You felt that you could give freely of yourself with no sense of sacrifice.
You were on top of the world and could confront any difficult situation without fear. You could
look upon others, even your competitors, in a more charitable light. That, my friend, is prosperity,
and is a result of high self-esteem. What, then, is the key to high self-esteem?
The answer is always the same. As I truly forgive you, I feel better about me.
Forgiveness is healing. Forgiveness is the key to love. Can you see the consistency of this logic?

FORGIVENESS IS THE KEY TO PROSPERITY.

Let's look at some of the problems you have with prosperity, and then we'll present some
solutions and even some "how to" ideas for achieving what you want. There seems to have been
a gigantic conspiracy for thousands of years to keep the world's masses in poverty and, I guess,
subsequently from power. Well, it's worked. You've been fed a bunch of superstitions, myths,
and garbage which you've generally accepted. Here are a few examples.
THE PROBLEMS
1.

It's more blessed to give than to receive. We all want to be spiritually blessed (and no one
is exempt from this desire). However, you think that means you must sacrifice something
you want in order to be blessed, and you have an immediate conflict. To show how much
you have accepted the idea of being less blessed as a receiver, think about what you do
when you receive something. You say, "Oh, you shouldn't have," and with great humility
try to express how unworthy of the gift you are. Then, as though to repay an
indebtedness, you devise a scheme to give something in return. Through all this, the
appropriate display of reciprocation is required on both sides, and thus you have reduced
unconditional giving to a barter. (If I have just attacked one of your sacred cows, please
be patient. It may get a lot worse before it gets better!)

2.

Give to get. This conspiracy knows how painful it is to give up something you want, so it
devised a clever "bargain belief" which prom ises that if you give to the conspiracy and
"have faith," enough will be returned to you to soothe the pain and fear of giving. No
concept could make more clear the world's agreement that giving represents a loss to you,
and getting something of greater value in return is necessary to justify your doing without.
It amazes me to see the various ways this concept has been dressed up in an attempt to
sanctify it and thus make it more convincing.

3.

You must earn by the sweat of your brow. This belief has been taught for thousands of
years, and even today someone who is financially well off is admired only if it can be said
that "he earned it." It is frequently said, "He worked hard for his money, so he's entitled
to it."

4.

Ask and it shall be given. This teaching is true, but you don't accept it because of your
belief in loss associated with giving. You think you're taking something away which, of
course, means a loss somewhere. So you don't ask unless your need is so great that a
loss somewhere else is justified. Then you join the thinking of the conspiracy and,attempt
a barter such as, "Please, Lord (or whomever you address as your source for good), if you
do this, I promise I'll do __________." Or you try to slide it through by asking for
something very small, such as, "I'm not asking for much, Lord, certainly you could see
your way clear to grant me _________." When all else fails, you try to close the deal

promising never to ask again, "Please, Lord, just this once, could you grant me
_________?"
5.

You are jealous and resentful of prosperity everywhere you see it. Whenever you see
someone really attractive or creative, or surrounded by friends at a party, or one who has
fancy clothes or a fine car, you think, "Why them and not me?" In sports, you hope for a
bad shot for others and a good shot for yourself. Those who are very wealthy or famous
become objects of scandalous rumors in an attempt to bring them down. The magazine
stands are filled with stories debasing famouspeople. It's not the publishers' fault; they
only print what sells, and you buy it because you want to believe it is true. It's easier for
you to justify your poverty if you. are shown that the lives of the rich and beautiful people
are filled with conflict and pain.

This same sickness takes the form of joy when another person fails. Some years ago I sold
office equipment for a large American company in Los Angeles. In five years I saw a lot of
salesmen come and go. Each time one failed and was fired, those who were just barely hanging
on felt relieved and uplifted because they would get to share the accounts of their fallen brother
and because they had survived the ax. This is a clear example of the erroneous concept that you
can gain from another's loss.
THE SOLUTIONS
All right, let's look at some solutions to the beliefs you've accepted. First, let us clarify what you
really want.

YOU REALLY WANT ONLY WHAT YOU CAN GIVE WITHOUT A SENSE OF SACRIFICE OR LOSS.
A feeling of prosperity results from giving away or sharing without a sense of loss or
resentment. What can you give away without a sense of loss? I'm going to ask you to fill in the
blanks.
If I can give away ... without a sense of loss or resentment, then an abundance of ...
would give me a feeling of prosperity. Use any word you like such as love, peace, wholeness,
money, joy, etc.
It really takes some honest introspection to get this. As I've discussed, giving away
money does represent loss to most people; similarly, you would feel resentment if you give
kindness or joy to someone you believe doesn't deserve it.
What does it really mean to give love or teach love? Love's key attribute is wholeness, so
giving or teaching love means seeing another person as whole, not in need of anything from you
(such as your criticism or your correction). Picture someone you resent or you feel has harmed
you. Maybe they just irritate you or are difficult to deal with. Choose someone you wouldn't go
out of your way to accommodate. Trying to see them as whole and OK might be very difficult and
would certainly require a change of mind about them. (Remember this process from the chapter
on gratitude and forgiveness?)

THE GIVING OR TEACHING OF LOVE (WHOLENESS) IS AN ATTITUDE BASED ON BELIEF

If you don't believe someone is OK, you certainly can't see them that way. Only your
inner-vision can see them as whole because it sees only from the,per spective of wholeness.

That's why you must ask your inner-vision to help you see that someone differently, so that when
you can see them as whole, your attitude toward them will reflect it. That's giving wholeness,
which you can do only because it is yours (in your belief). It's only by giving it away that you
have it (in your belief). That's why you give only to yourself.
Another attribute of love is joy. Can you greet this person joyously? And I don't mean just "being
nice." "Nice" is one of ego's substitutes for love. An attitude of joy toward them is a gift, and by
giving them joy, you also give the same gift to yourself.

YOU CAN ONLY HAVE JOY IN YOUR LIFE IF IT IS BEING EXPRESSED THROUGH YOU.
When you express (give/share) joy, the recipient is receiving a blessing, indeed, and your
awareness of joy is increased by so doing; thus are you both blessed. It is not more blessed to
give than to receive, but neither is it any less! The giver and receiver are not separated, but
spiritually one in the experience of joy and are thus equally blessed. You are giving only to
yourself, in reality, and so giving is better understood as sharing.

PROSPERITY REQUIRES A CONSCIOUSNESS OF SHARING.

Why is giving really sharing? Everything is a reflection of, or a result of, a thought or an
idea, including prosperity. Let's see how this works with thoughtsor ideas. If you share an idea,
you haven't lost anything. In fact, it is all still yours even though you have given it all away. By
expressing the idea, it is reinforced in your mind. This is why a teacher is the one who really
learns, and this is why you should clarify what it is you want to learn and teach it. Teach joy to
learn it. Give joy to have it.

HAVING RESTS ON GIVING.

What you can't give, you don't have in your life. This is why having and being is the same
thing; to have joy you must be joyous, which is sharing, and an equal blessing to you and to all
who receive it. You don't give to get: you give because you have and want to keep. You can
keep what you really want only by giving. When you are giving, you raise your selfesteem closer
to the level of your reality, which is love.

LOVE'S ONLY NATURE IS GIVING.

As you increase your awareness that your reality is love, you open your awareness to all
the good that is yours, just waiting to be accepted.
It is impossible NOT to have, but you may not KNOW you have. Giving means sharing,
and whatever is shared increases. "As you give, so shall you re ceive" means the cost of giving is
receiving or that the cost of sharing is accepting. As you share, your willingness to accept
increases. All the joy and peace and wholeness of the universe is waiting for you to claim through
the process of accepting and sharing.
Now let's deal with the most imprisoning thought I have ever encountered: that you must
earn by the sweat of your brow. It's simply not true! Some people, through hard work, earn a
tremendous amount of money and have no feeling of prosperity, while others on a very meager
income feel quite comfortable and prosperous. I've known people who work three jobs and can't
make ends meet, and still others who demonstrate prosperity and abundance effortlessly.

YOU DON'T EARN PROSPERITY BY HARD WORK.

What you manifest in feelings and material things are merely a reflection of the prosperity
you accept. However, because you were taught you must earn by the sweat of your brow,
perhaps hard work helps you feel good about yourself and lets you accept more prosperity. Why?
Because now you feel worthy of it.

WHATEVER PROSPERITY YOU FEEL IN LIFE IS YOURS BY RIGHT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

(PREMISE).
Let me give an example of "right of consciousness." Once when Theodore Roosevelt was
President, he was attending a high level dinner meeting. The waiter, not wanting to make ari
error, asked the counselor where President Roosevelt should be seated so he would be at the
head of the table. The counselor confidently replied, "it doesn't matter; wherever Teddy
Roosevelt sits will be the head of the table." He was a leader; he knew it; everyone else knew it,
too. He didn't have to earn it or prove it to anyone.

YOU CANNOT WORK YOUR WAY INTO A REALITY THAT IS NOT YOURS.
Only you can deprive yourself of a reality that is yours. You can break your back working
toward a promotion, but if you can't accept that you are worthy of the higher position, you will
have wasted the effort. When you have a prosperous consciousness, material reflections of that
awareness must manifest, and do so effortlessly.
You somehow think it is unfair for someone to receive something they apparently haven't
earned. Any laborer can tell you it's impossible to become a millionaire through back-breaking
work. So you tend to conclude that there must be something very questionable or crooked about
someone who is very wealthy, because he couldn't have earned it by the sweat of his brow. That
belief doesn't imprison him; it only imprisons you, who believe it. So you try to justify your
poverty by thinking you'll get to heaven and he won't because he can't get his camel through the
eye of a needle.
Now let's look at the relationship of prosperity to money and material things. Worldly
riches provide a feeling of prosperity in direct relationship to your purpose for them. Most people
use money to teach fear, not love; i.e., to prove that the world's premise is true. You use it to
feed, comfort, and adorn the body (to make the body your reality). You use it to teach separation
(this is mine, that is yours). You use it to teach guilt (in a lawsuit, the one who is guilty must
pay).

WHEN YOU USE MONEY AND OTHER THINGS TO TEACH LOVE, THEY BECOME TOOLS TO AID
YOUR FEELINGS OF PROSPERITY.
How does one use money to teach love? We've already discussed the ability to give
money away or share it without a sense of loss. But how about when you make a donation to
impress someone, or to receive recognition, or to obtain a position of influence? That's OK, but
the motivation is to fulfill a need (incompleteness is a premise of the ego, not of love). You are
teaching lack, and the result cannot be a feeling of prosperity.
Please understand it doesn't matter what you use your money for. But, what is it really
buying you? Tithing is a concept considered to be a loving use for money, but what is your
purpose for tithing? Would you feel guilty if you didn't? That's using money to teach guilt, not
love. Does it place you in good standing with others or does it buy you a membership on the

Board of Directors of your church?

YOU ESTABLISH THE VALUE FOR WHAT YOU RECEIVE BY THE PURPOSE OF YOUR GIVING.
A loving purpose for tithing might be to support your source of spiritual teaching. If you
want your church or center to be of great value to you, you establish this by your giving to it.
Tithing can be a method of reminding yourself on a regular basis the value you place on it. But
wait a minute: if you give little to it, you also establish that it will represent little value to you. It is
pathetic that someone wanting to get tremendous value from a Sunday morning message puts
little or nothing in the collection plate, for they have set a low value on what they have received
by pricing it low with what they have given. I realize that money is not the only way to give. In
fact a wealthy person may distribute money as a substitute for giving of themselves, which brings
us to the concept of selfless service.
Altruism is a rip-off. The truth is that the imagined "selfless good deeds" you perform are
deeply rooted in total selfishness. The sad part is that you are taught and believe otherwise.
You're taught that to do good for others without regard for your own interests is almost saintly.
Though not always promised, it is certainly implied that your good deeds will be greatly rewarded
in another place and time. As I have just pointed out about other institutional teachings, the idea
contradicts itself. If there is a reward of any kind, however subtly implied, the act cannot be
selfless.
You spend 100% of your time defending or enhancing your own self-esteem (and that
doesn't leave much time for selflessness). For example, think of the most selfless act you could
perform, such as visiting a sick relative in the hospital, mowing the neighbor's grass while he's on
vacation, or maybe turning off the headlights on a car without anyone ever knowing and
therefore able to thank you for saving them the aggravation of a dead battery. If nothing else,
doesn't it make you feel good to do it? Maybe give you a warm fuzzy feeling? Maybe even make
you relieved because it is something you believe you should do? That's your payoff. That's your
motivation, your reward.
Ok, what about the guy that gives his life to save another, the ultimate selfless deed.
First, it's a bad example because it is an extreme and therefore not a good teaching tool.
Secondly, it's not something most folks would do even though they might like to think they would.
So instead, apply it to examples of things you would do. In the section on belief systems, we
discussed the power of your beliefs: that your beliefs control your behavior and can cause you to
sacrifice everything (even your body) to be right. This is a negative motivation, but if a person
feels he should do something (even though it may cost him his life) and if he doesn't do it, he
might be so guilt-ridden that he couldn't live with himself (extreme loss of self-esteem).
So what if doing things for others is not selfless service? If it serves to enhance your own
self-esteem, would that not add to your feeling of prosperity? Of course it does, and many people
benefit by these efforts, but it is not without personal rewards.

THOUGH MANY MAY BENEFIT, YOU REALLY GIVE ONLY TO YOURSELF.

If you've been paying attention, by now a question must be surfacing. If you spend 100%
of your time enhancing or protecting your own self-esteem, and if a high self-esteem results in
prosperity, why doesn't everyone feel prosperous? Well, since you have chosen the ego as your
guide, you can be guided only to those thoughts that will appear to make you feel good about
yourself, but must reinforce the ego beliefs (guilt, incompleteness, separation, etc.). Keeping in
mind the old "garbage in/garbage out" computer analogy, you can begin to see the questionable
benefits of using the ego as your guide to happiness and prosperity.
Money is neutral. Like everything else, you give it a purpose. The use (purpose) you

decide upon reflects the value you place on it. What you value little will diminish in your life
through misuse. What you value highly will increase through "right-usefulness." The right use for
harmony, peace, love, and joy is sharing, which causes them to increase. The right use for the
body (and every other material thing, including money) is as a tool to communicate your reality,
which is love. When you use money to teach love, you have honored it with this "right
usefulness," or righteous purpose, and in the truest sense, have placed a high value on it.

MONEY, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, CAN HAVE REAL VALUE WHEN IT IS USED AS A TOOL TO
TEACH LOVE.
How do you use money to teach love? We have all experienced conflicts over money. Do
you let a conflict reveal your belief in vulnerability, lack, and separateness? Or can you use it as an
opportunity to teach that the other person's interests are the same as yours, that you are one,
whole, and complete, and not get caught up in the conflict? Any conflict results in some form of
fear (such as guilt, anger, or resentment).

EVERY ENCOUNTER INVOLVING MONEY MUST BE FREE OF CONFLICT AND FEAR IN ANY FORM.
For example, if a cashier at a restaurant overcharges you for a meal, should you ignore it
to avoid conflict? You can, if it doesn't cause you any resent ment, but if I were that cashier, I
would want to know about my mistake so I could correct it. If you can point out the error in a
way so as not to make another feel stupid or guilty, then there is no conflict. And if the cashier
and you both feel good about the experience, you have used a money transaction to teach love.
I know that a gift is not always accepted in the same spirit with which it is given, and you
can't control or choose the emotions others may experience from your actions. If, in this
example, the cashier seemed offended by your gift of wholeness and love, the gift was received
even though the appearance may not reflect it. A problem is that the ego can disguise its advice
so cleverly that you may even convince yourself that you acted in a loving manner while letting
the tiniest element of fear prevail.

YOU MUST BE VIGILANT THAT YOUR ATTITUDE REFLECTS THE SINCERITY OF YOUR PURPOSE
IN TEACHING LOVE.
You see, it's your ego's job to keep you believing in separation and lack. So if your little
voice counsels that the loving thing would be to tell the cashier that he is an idiot (for his own
good, of course), then you might want to ask for a second opinion, this time striving to hear the
voice of your inner-vision rather than the ego.
The more powerful or threatening the purpose of the encounter (as in money, sex, or
health), the more difficult it can be to maintain the attitude of whole ness, oneness, and love, but
the greater the blessing when you succeed!

WHAT ABOUT RICHES?

Enough about prosperity; let's talk about how to make money. What you're about to read
may not be the way you wished it were, which is why you've never seen it in a prosperity
seminar.
Spiritual prosperity seminars are a rip-off. There are presentations in which you are
encouraged to follow a particular spiritual teaching for the purpose of either curing your financial
problems or attaining great riches. The only one who gets rich from a spiritual prosperity seminar

is the one presenting it! People throng to them out of fear (hurting financially), and adore the
presenter because he says what they wish were true: that if they act lovingly, think spiritually, and
work for the glory of some supreme being, their cup will be filled to overflowing. The discrepancy
is that on the spiritual level, that's very true: your spiritual needs ARE completely and utterly
satisfied, which simply means that you can be at total peace (a spiritual need) while in abject
poverty or in tremendous physical pain. It's great that this is true, but is of little value in attaining
worldly riches. Spiritual values and worldly riches share only the most vague though important
relationship, as you will see toward the end of this chapter.
There are three essential elements in making and keeping a lot of money in this world:
luck, cleverness, and high self-esteem. We'll discuss each in detail, below.
1.

LUCK

That's right! Number one is just plain luck, and it takes many forms. Where and when you
were born can have a lot to do with your chances of having great wealth in your life. Imagine the
difference between entering this world in a Beverly Hills hospital or on the hot, open sands of
Ethiopia. Being born a minority with brain damage from your mother's heroin addiction or a
beautiful talented daughter of a movie star are both a matter of luck and can make a tremendous
difference. This is luck over which you have no control. You may have heard stories that say you
choose your parents or when and where you will be born. If you like that belief, fine but
remember, it's just a belief.

YOU ARE REWARDED BY THE WORLD FOR WHAT YOU HAVE TO OFFER IN THE MARKETPLACE.
A young white male who is clever, personable, attractive, talented, and well trained in
sales will make a fortune, while an old minority woman adept at clean ing floors has little hope for
riches. This luck you can do very little about. The lottery that is so popular today is an example of
the disadvantaged hoping to change the hand they were dealt for a dollar. It is an insidious tax
on the poor, but that's another issue.
There is a form of luck which involves 80% of the people and over which you do have
some control. It has been described as the point at which "opportunity meets preparation." These
opportunities happen moment-to-moment all day long in everyone's life, but precious few are
recognized or acted upon, so it could be stated more accurately:

GOOD LUCK OCCURS WHEN PREPARATION GRASPS OPPORTUNITY.

Everyone who is out in the world and at least half alive is presented daily with
opportunities to make money, either by investing what they have, providing a needed service, or
creating a new product to fill a gap in the market. If the product is lemonade on the corner for
two cents a glass, the rewards will be thin, whereas dreaming up a Hula Hoop or a Cabbage Patch
Doll could yield a bonanza. If the only service your talent can provide is mowing lawns, don't go
shopping yet for your Mercedes. If, however, you know how to broker loans for real estate
developers, there is no limit to the accumulation of wealth you can achieve.
So the opportunities are there, and you can be prepared to take advantage of at least
some of them. Most people miss them for a variety of excuses. We all have "if I'da" stories. "If
I'da" only bought gold when it was $35 an ounce!" "If I'da" only taken that job with IBM," etc.

THE TERM "LUCKY" IS RESERVED FOR THOSE WHO ARE PREPARED, SEE AN OPPORTUNITY,
AND GRASP IT.

Those few who grasp the opportunities that come along for which they are prepared reap
worldly wealth and you call them "lucky." But when the opportuni ties presented themselves,
these people were not only prepared, they did something about it! I have a friend who for seven
years has been preparing to make a killing in a sales program. The opportunity is a great one and
he is the most prepared person you could imagine, but he has yet to make his first sales
presentation.
2.

CLEVERNESS

The world is full of good guys and bad guys, winners and losers, sleepers and dogs.
Gaining worldly riches clearly depends upon the ability to distinguish
one from the other. Cleverness is simply the opposite of naivite. Simply put: do what you are
clever at, and don't do what you are naive at (that which you know little or nothing about). You
will be rewarded richly only if you are clever at, and do, something for which. the market pays
well. Over this you have considerable control!
If the market pays well for stockbrokers, and you are naive as a stockbroker, you can go
to school, study on your own, or train on the job, and maybe (although not necessarily) become
clever at it. If you then do it, you could be on your way to riches. This may sound like a lot of "if
"s, but the possibilities are all there and some people can put them all together. If you're a very
talented carpenter, you may never be a very clever stockbroker. You must choose whether to try
to make a lot of money at what you can't do well, and at which you may likely fail, or make a
living as a carpenter and use your surplus earnings to get rich some other way.

DO WHAT YOU DO WELL; DON'T DO WHAT YOU DONT DO WELL!

I began my earning career selling typewriters for Remington. I was thoroughly trained by
them and did very well, but I always wanted to sell airplanes. So after five years I began an
exciting, glamorous career as a Cessna salesman. It was the perfect job with great perks, and
potential for big money. After a year and a half, I was barely making a living at it, while some
others were getting rich. When the opportunity came to buy a typewriter store and go into
business, I took it, because although I felt that selling typewriters was a pretty stupid, uncreative
way to make money, I knew how to do it well. In six years I was financially independent, and
retired at age thirty five.
Unfortunately, the story wouldn't be complete without including the many efforts I made
at expanding my wealth through investments about which I was very naive. Yes, I was able to
return to the universe some of my gains through oil wells, commodities, stock, precious coins, etc.
Over 20 years, I'm probably $100,000 poorer for seizing opportunities for which I was ill-prepared,
and playing in sandboxes with kids more clever than I.
About six years ago my son-in-law and I found an excellent opportunity to enter a joint
venture to purchase VA repossessed homes for remodeling and rentals. I was financially
prepared to put up the money and he was mentally and physically prepared to do the work, but
he was naive about the process. It took us awhile working together for him to learn about
plumbing, wiring, painting, carpeting, interest, finance, and contracts and all the other things a
property manager needs to know, but cleverness can be learned! He now has control of, and
receives income from, 20 homes worth nearly a million dollars.
3.

HIGH SELF-ESTEEM
You may have heard folks brag about the millions they've earned and spent, or won and

lost. Making lots of money takes luck and cleverness, but holding on to it requires an image of
oneself that is compatible with being wealthy.

GUILT IS THE GREAT ADVERSARY OF SELF-ESTEEM AND THE DESTROYER OF WEALTH.

Because of stories written thousands of years ago, many people can only accept poverty
or mediocrity as their rightful inheritance. As I've outlined earlier, belief in unworthiness so
influences your self-image that you may sabotage your own best efforts. This is also the crippling
force in one's quest for greatness. You see famous people on their way to greatness, blatantly
destroying themselves because a high public image is in conflict with their own poor self-image.
We lived in New Zealand for five months in 1981. While we were there, a report appeared in the
newspaper about the lotteries: an astonishing 93% of the winners of large jackpots had lost all
their winnings within a year and their lives had been destroyed.
Whether or not the world thinks well of you is not the issue.

WHAT YOU FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF IS ALL-IMPORTANT.

Whether you are a good or bad person by the world's elastic yardstick means nothing.
You may know some horrible, despicable people who are very rich. You may justify your poverty
by saying, "I couldn't sleep nights if I had to do what they've done to get rich." Don't confuse this
with an essay on morals.

ANY SINGLE GOAL IS EASY TO ATTAIN.

If you want to get rich and be ethical, or rich and fair, or rich and popular, the conflict will
interfere with both goals. You will end up neither rich nor ethical but very proud of yourself,
because you may not be rich but certainly not as unethical as your rich competitor.
Now let's pause for a moment. I'm not saying one has to be rich to be happy, but
realistically, it's a goal (or at least a dream) for most normal people. And I'm not saying that to
get rich one has to be unethical or unfair, but a sampling of gossip in any community reveals the
integrity of the wealthy folk to be somewhat suspect. So in a quest for riches, it's something one
has to deal with. My point is that it matters not how the world sees you but your high self-esteem
that is essential. If your goal is for the world to see you as a' nice guy and be rich, you will likely
fail at one and maybe both.
I have a friend who is very wealthy, and although he has friends, he is disliked and
considered unethical by most people in town. By his own estimation (confirmed by my
experience of him), he has only the highest ethical standard and greatest love and compassion for
his fellow man. He feels good about himself.
It's time to summarize:

Material wealth and feelings of prosperity are not necessarily synonymous. One can be
wealthy and not feel prosperous or can feel prosperous without great material wealth.

Other than to the degree to which a spiritual teaching helps raise one's self-esteem, it is
best left out of any formula for getting rich.

There is no force in the universe that is concerned about your perceived physical needs
and desires. If you doubt this, ask anyone from a deprived Third World community or any
of the homeless people in our own country. There is a powerful source for a feeling of
peace and prosperity right in the middle of any physical crisis. All your
mental/emotional/spiritual needs are met by your inner-vision (the voice for love).

The three essential elements of gaining and keeping great material wealth are: 1) luck, 2)
cleverness, and 3) high self-esteem.

I wish you good luck; the rest is up to you!

CHECKLIST

RICHES ARE A SUBSTITUTE FOR PROSPERITY.

PROSPER17Y IS THE RESULT OF HIGH SELF-ESTEEM!
HIGH SELF-ESTEEM COMES ONLY FROM A GREATER AWARENESS OF YOUR REALITY, WHICH IS
LOVE.
FORGIVENESS IS THE KEY TO PROSPERITY.
YOU REALLY WANT ONLY WHAT YOU CAN GIVE WITHOUT A SENSE OF SACRIFICE (LOSS).
THE GIVING OR TEACHING OF LOVE (WHOLENESS) IS AN ATTITUDE BASED ON BELIEF.
YOU CAN ONLY HAVE JOY IN YOUR LIFE IF IT IS BEING EXPRESSED THROUGH YOU.
PROSPERITY REQUIRES A CONSCIOUSNESS OF SHARING.
HAVING RESTS ON GIVING.
LOVE'S ONLY NATURE IS GIVING.
YOU DONT EARN PROSPERITY BY HARD WORK.
WHATEVER PROSPERITY YOU FEEL IN LIFE IS YOURS BY RIGHT OF CONSCIOUSNESS
(PREMISE).
YOU CANNOT WORK YOUR WAY INTO A REALITY THAT IS NOT YOURS.
WHEN YOU USE MONEY AND OTHER THINGS TO TEACH LOVE, THEY BECOME TOOLS TO AID
YOUR FEELINGS OF PROSPERITY.

YOU ESTABLISH THE VALUE FOR WHAT YOU RECEIVE BY THE PURPOSE OF YOUR GIVING.
THOUGH MANY MAY BENEFIT, YOU REALLY GIVE ONLY TO YOURSELF.
MONEY, LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE, CAN HAVE REAL VALUE WHEN IT IS USED AS A TOOL TO
TEACH LOVE.
EVERY ENCOUNTER INVOLVING MONEY MUST BE FREE OF CONFLICT AND FEAR IN ANY FORM.
YOU MUST BE VIGILANT THAT YOUR ATTITUDE REFLECTS THE SINCERITY OF YOUR PURPOSE
IN TEACHING LOVE.
YOUAREREWARDED BY THE WORLD FOR WHAT YOU HAVE TO OFFER IN THE MARKETPLACE.
GOOD LUCK OCCURS WHEN PREPARATION GRASPS OPPORTUNITY.
THE TERM "LUCKY" IS RESERVED FOR THOSE WHO ARE PREPARED, SEE AN OPPORTUNITY,
AND GRASP IT.
DO WHAT YOU DO WELL; DON?T DO WHAT YOU DONT DO WELL!
GUILT IS THE GREAT ADVERSARY OF SELF-ESTEEM AND DESTROYER OF WEALTH.
WHAT YOU FEEL ABOUT YOURSELF IS ALL-IMPORTANT.
ANY SINGLE GOAL IS EASY TO ATTAIN.

CHAPTER 11
THE "BOTTOM LINE"
If you have been paying attention, you already know what the conclusions are, so this
section is just for those who like to jump to the back of the book to find out "who dunnit."
Your experience of life and the quality of that experience is determined by your own high
self-esteem (or lack thereof). Within this blessing also lies the curse. The good news is that you
have complete control over your own self-esteem. The bad news is, unfortunately, the same.

YOUR SELF-ESTEEM IS ENHANCED AND REDUCED BY GIVING, NOT GETTING.

What you feel about yourself determines what you have to give away. What you choose
to give away determines what you feel about yourself.

At every opportunity you have to give of yourself, your inclination as to what to offer is
determined by how you are feeling about yourself at the time. When you are feeling prosperous
(high self-esteem), you will be inclined to be charitable, patient, and understanding, and the result
will be an enhanced or higher self-esteem. In your experience of life, you will then be more aware
of the blessings waiting for you, and you will be more willing to receive and accept them.
In the exact same situation, if you are not feeling good about yourself (low self-esteem),
unless you are willing to pause and be guided by your inner-vision, you will not be inclined to be
charitable, patient, etc. Your gift will be some form of fear (defensiveness, criticism, etc.) and the
result will be a lower self-esteem. This will keep you blinded to the good that is waiting to
happen in your life.

Don't confuse this with the ego's trick guidance of "give to get." If your purpose for being
charitable to someone is to get a blessing in your life, you can easily be disappointed, although it
can be the result. And don't think that you can give some form of fear (anger, disappointment,
etc.) and then reconstruct your selfesteem through some therapy thinking gadget of the world's .
Once the gift is released, the cause and the effect on your self-esteem is assured. That's a law for
which you can be grateful only if your purpose is to teach love. You can't give away some form of
fear, then make up for it through some behavior (such as an apology) hoping it will result in an
experience of love.
It is definitely appropriate to apologize to someone whenever you become aware that you
been unloving toward them. That alone, however, will not restore your self-esteem. It is from
your next opportunity to be charitable or condemning that your self-esteem will be enhanced, or
once more reduced, by what you choose to give.
There is never a need to "get" anything, there is only an ignorance of what is already
available for you in life. A low self-esteem does not allow your mind to be aware of, or accept
freely, all that is yours. The hiighest possible self-esteem is the awareness that your reality is
love. Every thought that teaches love raises your awareness closer to that reality.

YOU CAN ONLY HAVE WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY!

In a relationship, if I'm being grouchy and you feel good about yourself, you can avoid
getting caught up in my conflict. If I try to blame you for my unhappiess, you can avoid being
defensive. Im talkingabout being pious, but charitable. Sometimes it's easy; sometimes it
requires inner-vision to see the OKness in conflict.

IT IS IN THE ABILITY TO SEE PEACE THAT PEACE IS CREATED.

The result is an experience of peace in your life, and there is no other way. You cannot
force peace in turbulence, but seeing the peace that inner-vision reveals makes peace real in your
life.
In a business deal, it's easy for you to see the other person's interests as less important
than your own. Though you would not overtly cheat them, any effort that can maximize your
gain, even at their loss, can easily be rationalized in the ego's thinking. If, however, a full
disclosure would cause you to feel less than proud, the cost to you is immense.

EVERY EFFORT TO GAIN AT ANOTHER'S LOSS CHEATS ONLY YOURSELF.

Let's say you are attending a seminar or workshop where the fee has not been set in
advance. You are allowed to contribute whatever you think it is worth. You are in control of the
value you get from the seminar. Your mind will not let you experience a great value if you choose
to put a low price on it. You must contribute as much as you reasonably can - not for the
speaker's sake, but for yours. It is your gift of significant value which enhances your self-esteem
and allows you to receive and accept.
The sole benefit of tithing to a center of spiritual teaching is as a regular reminder to
yourself of the value the teaching represents to you. That's giving to know you have. If you do it
out of guilt (because you think you should), to impress someone, or to obtain a place on the
board, you are cheating yourself. That's giving to get.

YOUR BODYAND EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD ARE BUT TOOLS TO TEACH WHAT YOU BELIEVE
IS TRUE.
When you use your body (or mind, or anything) to behave in a fearful way, you devalue it,
which, is a misuse resulting in a lowering of self-esteem. Persistent misuse must result in a
breakdown. Everything that you use to teach love reveals its highest possible value.
In this manual, you have discovered the real tools available to you for the care and
maintenance of your life. Up to this time, you may have felt that there were
some situations in which you had no choice, but the truth is:

YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE.

In a state of fear, you may not seem to have a choice. It is therefore essential to first
establish your peace through the aid of your inner-vision. And then a variety of options will
become apparent.
You now know that your choices determine your experiences of life. Your first instruction
in this manual was, "Don't let your past rule your choices today." It's time to establish for yourself
that the only purpose for your life is teach love, and then:

LET YOUR PURPOSE GUIDE YOUR CHOICES!

When Alice asked, "Which road should I take?", the response was, "Where do you want to
go?" Alice replied, "I'm really not sure," to which the answer was, "Then take any road you want;
it really doesn't matter.
When questions arise as to which choice you make, simply ask yourself, "What's my
purpose for doing this?" or "What do I really want to accomplish?"
Life will constantly present you with lures that tempt you to pretend that something is true
which which you know is not. By definition, all lures are appealing, and yet they contain a barbed
hook. You are now aware of all you need to know. Whenever you are lured into the temptation
to pretend that you can teach some form of fear and yet still experience love, ask yourself, What
am I pretending not to know?
So now the teaching is over and the lesson begins. You have learned nothing by reading
this book. You are merely aware of some ideas. They are not yours until you give them away.
You will not learn them until you teach them. "Teaching" is not the words you say, but the gift
(thought) in your mind as you look upon a person or situation. That gift is then reflected in your
words and actions. Your challenge is best represented by a story I heard while we were teaching
in Hong Kong.
In a small town lived a wise man to whom everyone came for counsel. There also lived
two boys who had devised a scheme to make a fool out of the wise man.
They decided to capture a baby sparrow and one of the boys, holding the bird cupped in
his hands, would ask the wise man to guess what he was hold ing. As a set-up, the boy would let
a few tail feathers show between his fingers. Since the wise man would surely announce with
pride that it was a baby sparrow, the boy would then ask if it was alive or dead. If the wise man
said it was dead, the boy would immediately release it to fly away, but if he said it was alive, the
boy would crush it in his hands and let it fall to the earth.
So with a baby sparrow cupped securely in his hands, the boy and his friend confronted
the wise man and said, "Oh, wise man, what do I have in my hands?" Seeing a few tail feathers
showing between the boys fingers, the wise man easily declared, "You are holding a baby

sparrow." The wise man's quick response told the boy that his scheme was working perfectly, so
the boy inquired, "is it alive or dead?" to which the wise man replied:

"IT'S IN YOUR HANDS."

CHECKLIST

YOUR SELF-ESTEEM IS ENHANCED AND REDUCED BY GIVING, NOT GETTING.

YOU CAN ONLY HAVE WHAT YOU GIVE AWAY!
IT IS IN THE ABILITY TO SEE PEACE THAT PEACE IS CREATED.
EVERY EFFORT TO GAIN AT ANOTHERS LOSS CHEATS ONLY YOURSELF.
YOUR BODYAND EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD ARE BUT TOOLS TO TEACH WHAT YOU BELIEVE
IS TRUE.
YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE.
LET YOUR PURPOSE GUIDE YOUR CHOICES!
ITS IN YOUR HANDS.