Know that if anyone has gone from sickness to health, fat to slim, addiction to choice, poor to rich, clumsy to agile, miserable to happy, or discontentment to fulfillment, then that capacity is part of the universal human condition. Even if only one person has ever accomplished it, then it is indeed possible. And, even if it has never been before—such as a cure for polio prior to 1954, or an airplane ride in 1745—the fact that one unique individual is capable of conceiving it in his or her mind is all that is required for humankind to be open to the possibility. Replace the belief that something you are capable of imagining in your mind is impossible with the belief that it is possible. Go to work on that thought right now, in this moment, which is the only physical reality you have.
7. You can go beyond logic. Although you may not be completely comfortable relying on something other than logic and rational thinking, try to let in the idea that there is another dimension that is very much a part of you, which has nothing to do with logic or scientific validation. You have never seen, touched, smelled or physically felt a thought or a dream or a feeling, yet you know they exist. There is no rational proof for the existence of intuition, yet you know that it exists within you. Until a few years ago there was no physical proof for the presence of microscopic life, yet it existed. And so it is with a portion of your humanity that I call your soul. While we haven’t come up with a “soulscope” to rationally prove its existence, we have, nevertheless, an inkling that such a dimension persists as part of our humanness. There are some who will never believe it unless they see it. Others will see it because they believe it.
These are the seven beliefs you can use as mental steps to setting your internal gyroscope for real magic. There are some who live their entire lives content with the limitations of their five senses. Real magic and miracle making are not on their life agenda. For others, like you and me, while we know the physical part of us to be a beautiful miracle in and of itself, we also know there is a spiritual dimension, beyond the scope and boundaries of our physical universe. The differences between these two awarenesses—physical only versus spiritual and physical—are many. The next chapter will describe in more detail what these specific differences are and how the benefits of real magic and miracle making become available by shifting your consciousness to include your spiritual side.
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BECOMING A SPIRITUAL BEING
We are born into the world of nature; our second birth is into the world of spirit.
—BHAGAVAD GITA
Few of us have been trained to tap into the power of our minds. We have been raised on a steady diet of logic, rationality and a “believe it when you see it” mentality. In short, we have been brought up to believe only in those things that we can understand and verify. Miracles cannot be understood by the rational mind. They defy logic. They cannot be “understood” in the ways we have been conditioned to think. Therefore, in order to enter the world of real magic you will need to learn how to go way beyond your rational mind and enter the dimension of spirituality.
MOVING PAST SKEPTICISM
Any minimal spiritual training you have received has likely come through the medium of some religious organization. The wonderful gift of religion is the teaching that we are spiritual in nature, and that we all have a soul as part of our humanity. The major drawback of religion is that it teaches that the soul must conform to rules and regulations, and that these restrictions of the soul come directly from the dogma of a particular religion and its representatives, But the soul does not conform to any of the boundaries or laws that have been assigned to it. It is dimensionless, formless and invisible. Even writing about it is very difficult because sentences must come to an end, while the soul is endless.
Because of your formal training you have very likely adopted a skeptical attitude toward spirituality. In order to participate in the high drama of miracle making and real magic, you must believe in your spiritual self, which has absolutely nothing to do with your religious affiliation. Whatever you choose to call that higher intelligence that suffuses your form, whatever the name of your spiritual teacher, it is inconsequential to your miracle-making potential. I am simply encouraging you to develop an authentic knowing about this part of your humanity. Maurice Nicoll wrote in Living Time these words, which I find most appropriate on this matter:
We do not grasp that we are invisible…. We do not understand that life, before all definitions of it, is a drama of the visible and invisible. We think that only the visible world has reality and structure and do not conceive the possibility that the inner world we know as thought, feeling and imagination, may have a real structure and exist in its own space, although not the space that we are in touch with through our sense organs.
To develop the knowing within you of the truth in Nicoll’s words, you have much to overcome. You will be asked to believe in the unknowable, something that you’ve been taught not to do. But it is always there, as H. L. Mencken put it so deliciously: “Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.” Indeed, it is right there and yet you cannot put your fingers on it for even an instant. Becoming a spiritual being involves forgetting about your five senses, including that finger that you cannot place, and developing a calm sense of trust in that which you know suffuses you but which you can never prove with logic or our current measuring devices.
Once you have the experience of this invisible dimension—and you know this higher place you can go to within your mind, and receive guidance and, yes, even the help in creating real magic for yourself—you will have shifted from being an exclusively physical person, a human being having a spiritual experience, to a spiritual being having a human experience. Certainly you will not deny your physical self in any way. In fact, your shift to becoming a spiritual being will magnify and enhance your physical life in a multitude of ways. The place for creating real magic will be in your spiritual awakening, yet it will be manifested here and now in this physical world where you find yourself every day.
You want your enhanced miracle-making ability to appear in the reality that you call your physical life. When this special knowing becomes real for you and is something that you can turn to and trust within yourself, it is like being so wealthy that, regardless of what you do, you’ll always have money. You will be comforted in knowing that you can never lose your spiritual contact once you have it, and know that it is always a part of you.
While I am asking you to accept this invisible world that you know exists but, as Nicoll stated, you cannot point to with your senses, there are many respected people in our scientific community hard at work attempting to prove scientifically the existence of the soul. Though it is not my purpose here to prove or disprove anything in the scientific sense, a few words about these studies will help you to get moving in the direction of becoming first a spiritual being and then a physical being that is a result of your spirituality.
In the fascinating book Recovering the Soul, Larry Dossey, M.D., presents a comprehensive picture of the evidence supporting a nonlocal theory of the human mind. The theory states that the human mind is not restricted to a body or a brain, but somehow exists in time and space in concert with the physical body. This nonlocal view of the mind opens up enormous possibilities. As Dr. Dossey puts it:
Suppose for the moment that we could show that the human mind is nonlocal; that it is ultimately independent of the physical brain and body, and that as a correlate it transcends time and space. This I believe would rank in importance far beyond anything ever discovered, past or present, about the human organism. This discovery would strike a chord of hope about our inner nature that has been silenced in an age of science; it would stir a new vision of the human as triumphant over flesh and blood. It would anchor the human spirit once again on the side of God instead of randomness, chance and decay. It would spur the human will to greatness instead of expediency and self service…. And once again we might recover something tha
t has been notably absent in our experience of late: the human soul.
This idea that the soul is timeless and nonlocal is indeed fascinating. It is being investigated by scientists in various specialties, and I am certain we will soon have incontrovertible evidence of this nonlocal position. Imagine the difference such a piece of evidence would provide for us as human beings. Knowing that the soul survives death of the physical body will help us to rearrange our ways of dealing with each other while we are here on earth. It will drastically affect our medical practices. As Dr. Dossey points out:
No longer would it be the ultimate goal of the modern healer to forestall death and decay, for these would lose their absolute status if the mind were ultimately transcendent over the physical body…. And if humanity really believed that nonlocal mind were real, an entirely new foundation for ethical and moral behavior would enter, which would hold at least the possibility of a radical departure from the insane ways human beings and nation-states have chronically behaved toward each other, and further, the entire existential premise of human life might shift toward the moral and the ethical, toward the spiritual and the holy.
It is within this context that I ask you to look carefully at becoming your own spiritual being, for it is within this context that all miracle making and real magic will be experienced. And once you have developed the inner knowing of your spiritual, nonlocal self, all of the external scientific data becomes meaningless. But, to help you suspending your disbelief, here are a few opinions from contemporary scientific thinkers on this subject.
Robert Herrman—scientist, executive director of American Scientific Affiliation and author of The God Who Would Be Known—puts it this way: “Everywhere you look in science, the harder it becomes to understand the universe without God.”
When pressed to define God, theologians and scientists find themselves in rare agreement. They know that in a physical world of cause and effect, somehow the whole thing had to get rolling. They also know that some kind of invisible force holds the whole thing together, including all matter. Rather than viewing God as a deity off in the sky somewhere, they see God as a presence pervading the universe. Hence the biblical notion of “in him we live and move and have our being.”
For the scientific community, who live and feast on hard evidence, there is much disagreement on this entire business of the soul and God as a presence in all life. Yet scientists know that something exists in all life that defies logic. A heart begins beating within a mother’s womb six or seven weeks after conception and the entire process is one gigantic mystery to even our most sophisticated scientific minds. Forty years ago the answer to the question “Do you believe in God?” was most commonly answered with, “Of course not, I’m a scientist.” Today, more and more, the scientist’s answer to the same question is, “Of course, I’m a scientist.”
Those in the new physics of quantum mechanics are only beginning to prove what metaphysics (beyond physics) has indicated for centuries. We are all connected, there is an invisible force in the universe that pervades all life. Even more astonishing, as reported by John Gliedman in Scientific Digest a decade ago (July 1982), is that “several leading theorists have arrived at the same startling conclusions: their work suggests a hidden spiritual world, within all of us.” Gliedman sardonically called it “the ghost in the machine.” It is this apparition within all of us—this dimension of our humanity that defies measurement, rules and cause and effect—that continues to baffle scientists. Yet even many of their own are now concluding that the “soul”—that “ghost in the machine”—exists. Gliedman’s article, titled “Scientists in Search of the Soul,” quotes many of the most respected and distinguished scientists from all over the globe. Some conclude that our nonmaterial (invisible) self is what constitutes our human traits of conscious self-awareness, free will, personal identity, creativity and emotions. They contend that the invisible presence exerts a physical influence on us and, even more astounding, that this nonmaterial self survives the death of the physical brain.
Another intriguing notion comes from John von Neumann, a mathematician and scientist described by Nobel laureate Hans Bethe as perhaps “the smartest man who ever lived.” Bethe once remarked, “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like John von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.” And what were von Neumann’s conclusions? “That physical reality was a figment of the human imagination and that the only true reality was thought.” Eugene Wigner, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in physics who studied von Neumann’s formulations, stated publicly, “Man may have a nonmaterial consciousness capable of influencing matter.”
To put it in my own non-Nobel-laureate language: You have the capacity to create miracles and live a life of real magic, by using your invisible self to influence your physical reality. When you truly become a spiritual being first and a physical being second, and know how to live and breathe in this new alignment, you will become your own miracle worker.
In all fairness, Gliedman also writes at length about the many distinguished scientists who take the contrary position that we have no proof of the existence of the soul. We can recognize these people as members of the same fraternity who throughout recorded history have declared that we have no proof—and thus microscopic life does not exist, flying machines are impossible and the earth is not round. For me, the existence of the soul does not need any scientific validation. I know what I know about myself and my proof is in my own experience. The metaphysicians and the poets have expressed truth for me that is particularly relevant on this matter of the existence of the soul. Listen to William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour….
We are led to believe a lie
When we see with, not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night, to perish in a night,
When the Soul slept in beams of light.
How magnificent a vision! Holding infinity in the palm of your hand. Indeed we are led to the big lie—that we are just these aging bodies. Instead, Blake reminds us that our soul, our spiritual being, does not die nor is it born, but is eternal and formless as a beam of light.
Keep uppermost in your mind that becoming a spiritual being involves being able to touch your invisible self and know that it is the secret to your ultimate ability to become a miracle maker. That inner formless self is your imagination. Albert Einstein, who combined the qualities of both poet and scientist, summed it all up nicely: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.
OUR GREATEST TEACHERS
Without exception all of our greatest teachers, and those who have made the greatest impact on humanity, have been spiritual beings. They did not limit themselves to the five senses in any way. All of the great teachers and doctrines, including Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Sufism and Confucianism, have left us with a similar message. Go within, discover your invisible higher self, know God as the love that is within you.
These spiritual masters were all miracle makers. They were here to teach us about the incredible power that resides within each of us. It seems ironic that as a people we have been obsessed with what divides us, with war and the building of more and more powerful delivery systems of hatred and killing, yet the most influential and revered of the world’s teachings all have a message of love. For example:
Christianity: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
Buddhism: He that loveth not, knoweth not God. For God is love.
Judaism: Love is the beginning and end of the Torah.
Confucianism: Love belongs to the high nobility of
Heaven, and is the quiet home where man should dwell.
Sufism: Sane and insane, all are searching lovelorn For Him, in mosque, temple, church alike. For only God is the One God of Love, And Love calls from all these, each one His home.
Becoming a spiritual being is synonymous with becoming a miracle worker and knowing the bliss of real magic. The differences between people who are nonspiritual, or “physical only,” beings and those whom I call spiritual beings are dramatic. Examine the following delineation of how both of these beings live with their invisible selves, their minds. Getting yourself aligned with the thinking of spiritual beings is your task, if you truly want to know this illusive thing that I keep referring to as real magic.
SPIRITUAL VERSUS NONSPIRITUAL BEINGS: THE SPIRITUAL DOZEN
I use the terms spiritual and nonspiritual in the sense that a spiritual being has a conscious awareness of both the physical and the invisible dimension, while the nonspiritual being is only aware of the physical domain. Neither category, as I use them, implies atheism or religious orientation in any way. The nonspiritual person is not incorrect or bad because he or she experiences the world only in a physical manner.
Below are listed the “spiritual dozen,” twelve beliefs and practices for you to cultivate as you develop your abilities to manifest miracles in your life. Becoming a spiritual being as outlined here is an all-out necessity if real magic is your objective in this lifetime.
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