by Marc Allen
The vision, the collective thought, is reaching critical mass, and once that happens our lives and our world will change very quickly. We are on the verge of a global evolutionary leap — for growth and evolution is not a slow, steady process, it goes by leaps and bounds instead.
It might be ten years — it might be fifty or a hundred — before the global wake-up call that began in the last half of the twentieth century has global impact. Who knows how long it will take? It is happening in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all.
IT ALL BEGINS WITH A DREAM
It all begins with a dream, and continues as the dream continues. Find the courage that is somewhere within you to dream the greatest dreams you can, and then take whatever steps you can to move toward them. What could be more fulfilling?
First dream, then imagine possibilities and plans,
then move forward on your plans —
and you’ll soon create the life of your dreams.
SUMMARY
• Discover what you love to do. You already know what it is, though you may have to do a bit of soul searching to recollect it. If you could do anything, what would it be? If you won the lottery, what would you do?
• Do what you love to do. Keep doing it. Make it an intention that it will support you abundantly. Look for a way to do it and you will be led to it, step by step.
• The reason most of these keys remain mysterious is not that we haven’t heard them, but because they are so simple. Here’s the simple truth: Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find.
• As soon as you affirm a goal, you are creating a thought, and your thoughts have powerful effects within you and in your world.
• Keep remembering your dreams. Acknowledge — and celebrate! — that you have something unique to offer the world. You have unique abilities, talents, and gifts.
• Keep doing what you love to do. When you do what you love, you find life works out perfectly, in extraordinary ways you can’t even imagine at first.
• Most of us fear failure, but let’s celebrate it instead! We can learn how to fail with grace, ease, and lightness. Everyone who has succeeded has had failures along the way. They are an essential part of our education.
• Those that try and keep trying usually have some failures, but they inevitably succeed. We’ve all heard this before! If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.
• It is inevitable: If you keep trying, you’ll probably fail at first, but eventually you’ll get the brass ring or whatever it may be that acknowledges you have attained the dream you have affirmed and intended in your heart.
• Our ultimate purpose is to evolve into something greater, to transform our lives and our world for the better.
• The important thing is to live a life we can look back on with affection and satisfaction and love, and even with grace, ease, and lightness.
• More and more of us are beginning to see how we can work in partnership. A vision of a world working in partnership is beginning to emerge in the collective thought. As soon as it reaches critical mass, we will quickly make a global evolutionary leap. Prepare yourself for some startling and truly marvelous results.
LIVING THE LIFE OF YOUR DREAMS — STEPS TO WEALTH AND FULFILLMENT
(1) Imagine your ideal scene; list and affirm your goals.
(2) Write your plan as a simple, clear visualization.
(3) Discover your vocation and purpose.
(4) See the full half of the glass, the benefits in adversity,
and keep picturing success.
(5) Live and work in partnership with all.
(6) Avoid management by crisis with clear goals
and transparency.
(7) Love change and learn to dance.
(8) Discover your core beliefs,
and learn how to change them.
(9) Grow at your own pace,
with an architecture of abundance.
(10) Give abundantly and reap the rewards:
Put “The Ten Percent Solution” to work in your life.
(11) Become more aware of the spiritual side of life,
the power of prayer, meditation, and relaxation.
(12) Do what you love to do, and success will follow.
You can transform your life and your world
by doing what you love to do.
It is happening already,
as more people have the dream
and see the vision —
the vision of a great number of us
working in partnership
to make our lives far more satisfying
and the world a far better place.
AFTERWORD
HOW THE PROCESS WORKS
At the core of this Course is a simple process. I have seen repeatedly — in my own life and in many others — that it works, but I have yet to fully understand how. Perhaps at its core it will always remain a mystery, for we are dealing with the forces of creation — the same forces that created our bodies, our minds, our emotional lives, our spirit, our world, the galaxies, the universe.
But in at least one way the process is clear to me:
When you imagine your ideal scene, when you clearly state and affirm a goal, you are in effect asking your subconscious mind to show you the next step toward that ideal scene and goal.
With the power of your thoughts and words, you are able to access something deep within you, deep within the core of the process of creation, and ask for its guidance and assistance. You can express this process in many different ways, with many different words, depending on your background and preferences:
You can say you are conditioning your subconscious, or programming your bio-computer, or planting seeds of thought in your creative mind, asking your intuition for guidance, connecting to the source of all creation, asking in prayer, petitioning to a higher power, declaring to the creative forces of the universe, summoning your guiding spirits, aligning yourself with the quantum field, opening yourself up to the field of all possibilities. You can say you are tuning into the force that guides the galaxies, and using it to guide you.
Put it any way you want, but once you start to use these tools, you will be guided, every step of the way — by intuition, by spirit, by your subconscious mind, by God, by the Tao, call it what you will.
Nearly every morning I take a stroll and say a little prayer. That prayer is my petition to the universe. Nearly every morning — or sometime throughout the day — I affirm, In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all I pray — and then I state my goals.
The first time I say a new goal, I know it’s a good goal for me if I feel a bit of excitement, a thrill of new possibility. If it’s a challenging, expansive goal, doubts and fears come up, but the words in an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all have a way of diminishing those doubts and fears, and eventually even eliminating most of them.
After a few weeks or a few months of affirming the goal, an inner shift happens, easily and effortlessly, and what was a distant dream has now somehow become a very good possibility. It has become realizable, in an easy and relaxed manner, and the next steps to take are obvious. Over time, what had been a fantasy becomes an intention. And my intuition, or the universe, call it what you will, starts sending me messages about my goal. It may be as general as suggesting it’s time to write a brief plan — and then I will quickly be shown the plan — or it may be as specific as nudging me to contact a certain person with a question or suggestion. It may be some other person coming in out of the blue who wants to help me in some way with my plan.
The goal has obviously been planted in my subconscious mind, and forces that are beyond my normal waking consciousness are at work on it. Then the fun begins.
CREATING OPPORTUNITIES
At some point in this process — usually after just two or three weeks — the opportunities begin to appear. Cr
eative ideas come out of nowhere. Creative people show up with suggestions, or offer to assist in some way. Each opportunity seems obvious; it often seems odd that I didn’t see it before. It makes me realize we are all surrounded by opportunities, all the time, but we usually don’t see them, because in some way we haven’t opened ourselves up to them, we haven’t become receptive to them.
Doing this simple process makes us aware of opportunities, benefits, and gifts all over the place — so many that we can pick and choose between them, and do only those that are easy and relaxed, healthy and positive, for the highest good of all.
AN EXAMPLE OF THE PROCESS
Here’s an example of how the process works. A while ago, I began to pray and affirm these words:
In an easy and relaxed manner,
in a healthy and positive way,
I am now taking a quantum leap —
personally, emotionally, and financially.
It is an unusually vague affirmation; it has no clearly defined goal. I had a sense of what I meant by “taking a personal, emotional, and financial quantum leap,” though I couldn’t express it more clearly than that. But it felt right to say those words. Something about the affirmation was exciting — it seemed to promise new possibilities.
After a few weeks of affirming this regularly, some opportunities came along, and things started to happen, in quick succession. Perhaps the most important thing that happened was that The Power of Now fell into my lap, the single best book I have ever read or published, and that book changed my life in such a way that it isn’t an exaggeration to call it a quantum leap — personally, emotionally, and financially. Then four other great books came along that we published in rapid succession, and each of them in their own way helped me in taking that quantum leap.
Only a few months after I started saying that affirmation, several other very different and strong possibilities became obvious to me. I have no doubt each one would have helped as well to fulfill my goal. So I simply took the easiest and most enjoyable ones, and let the others go — and I took a quantum leap in my personal life, emotional experience, and financial life, in an easy and relaxed, healthy and positive way.
This is a common phenomenon, and worth repeating: We start affirming and then have to choose among all the possibilities. This is where the words In an easy and relaxed manner (etc.) come into play: If the option doesn’t feel easy and relaxed, or healthy and positive, or for the highest good of all, we can let it go, and pick an option that is.
EXPERIENCE, TALENT, AND MONEY ARE NOT ESSENTIAL
The process works regardless of how much or little education you have had, or how much money, intelligence, experience, or talent you have. All those things don’t matter. All the excuses you have for not succeeding are not valid. Many people with the same problems that you have succeeded brilliantly in doing what they love, once they understood what is important, what is truly essential to make this process work.
The one thing that matters, that makes all the difference in the world, is the direction in which you focus your mind. What matters is whether you choose to focus on the problems or on the solutions you can come up with, the opportunities in front of you, and the gifts you have.
When you work with this simple process, you plant seeds of thought and emotion in your powerful subconscious mind, and it says Yes! to your words and gets to work. It’s worth repeating, until we know it on a deep level:
Your education, experience, talent, intelligence,
and financial situation don’t matter.
The important thing is the direction in which you focus
your unique, powerful, creative mind.
All your old excuses don’t matter any more. You are a creative being, capable of realizing your dreams. You simply have to focus on your dream, repeatedly, and then make a plan. Take the first few obvious steps in front of you, and keep taking the next steps as they become clear to you.
By doing this simple process, we align ourselves in some way with the creative forces of the universe, regardless of how well we understand those forces and regardless of the words we use to describe them.
ENVISION YOUR DEEPEST WISHES
It sounds odd and simplistic when it is put into words. I am trying to describe something I have seen and felt in my life, and it proves elusive. Maybe that’s because, at its core, the process is eternally mysterious: It is the mystery of creation itself.
Whatever it is, we’re an integral part of it, and can affect it and use it to fulfill our dreams. I wrote these words years ago for the beginning of a “new age symphonic rock” piece called “Overture”; the music was written by my gifted friend Sky Canyon:
Envision your deepest wishes
Within us are shimmering forces of creation!
Just clearly imagine whatever you wish
Within the depths of our being
is the power of realization.
A SPIRITUAL EXPLANATION
There is a force that is present everywhere, the powerful force of creation. Some call it the Creator. Some call it God. Some call it the Tao. Some call it the quantum field. Some call it chemistry, or physics.
Whatever we call it, it is present everywhere and all powerful. That means it is part of us and we are part of it. It means we wield within us great forces of creation.
God is omnipresent and omnipotent —
present everywhere and all powerful.
We wield tremendous forces of creation
within us.
Neither a great intelligence
nor imagination nor both together
go to the making of a genius.
Love, love, love —
that is the soul of genius.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
SUPPLEMENT A
THE SHORT COURSE
THE SHORT COURSE FOR ARTISTS, AND THE YOUNG, OVERWHELMED, OVERWORKED, OR HOPELESSLY LAZY
If you are an artist, or if you’re young, lazy (I’m hopelessly lazy), overwhelmed, or overworked, have no fear: There’s hope for you too!
If, for any reason, you can’t or don’t want to plow through this entire Course, here’s a short version — and it may very well be all you need to dramatically improve your life.
This first section about the origin of The Short Course is entirely optional — feel free to skip it if you want to.
ORIGIN OF THE SHORT COURSE
After Visionary Business was published, a young friend of mine said, “It looks interesting — but it’s, well, a book, and....” He didn’t complete the sentence, just shrugged his shoulders, and it was obvious he meant he would never read something that long and involved. He asked me to summarize the book — to tell him in as few words as possible what it was about.
I ended up giving him this short Course.
He is an artist, and also completely ignorant of the business world. As a result, he’s a poverty case. When I think about it, he is a lot like I was when I was his age, in my twenties. I had ideas for books and I was playing music, but I had no clue how to make those things support me financially.
In many ways, I’m still a complete idiot. I meet many people who are far more intelligent than I am, far more capable, educated, sensible, and organized. Computers and machines are total mysteries to me. So is a toilet, for that matter. Once or twice I made the mistake of trying to fix a toilet — to just seat the little thingy inside so it would plug the hole in the bottom and quit running all the time — and I invariably made it far worse and had to call in someone who understood its complex mechanical mysteries.
Yet I’ve been able to envision (out of “thin air”) the business of my dreams, and manifest it in reality — a business that supports me and many others abundantly, in a highly satisfying way.
How did I do that?
First of all, I realized that I am basically a simple person, and I need to understand things in simple language — language a five-year-old can grasp. Then I realized the process itself is simple and ca
n be expressed in very few words. And so, for my artist friends, for myself, and for all others who could use it, here’s the short version of the Course.
THE SHORT COURSE
There are four simple steps to follow that are keys to success. They are simple to explain, but can be challenging at times to put into practice. That’s a good thing, though: Within the challenges and problems that arise are endless opportunities, benefits, and gifts.
1
DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE. DECIDE TO DO WHAT YOU LOVE.
Most artists know what they want to do with their lives, but a lot of people don’t. So of course it is important for us to discover what we really want to do. It is always the thing we love the most.
If money were no object, what would you do with your life?
2
DO IT, IN WHATEVER WAY YOU CAN, AND KEEP DOING IT. SOONER OR LATER, YOU’LL GET GOOD AT IT.
Do the thing you love to do in whatever way you can. Do it evenings, weekends, whenever you can. Watch a little less TV and do your thing instead.