Practice the new strategies you see come up on the inner screen of your meditations. You can focus on a divinely spiritual being that is held most holy and perfect in your mind, and literally ask that being what you can do to make your relationships magical and perfect. You will hear guidance coming to you that is motivated out of love and all I have been writing about in this chapter. There are no limits to what you can create in your mind during your meditative hours. You can consult anyone, create their presence right there in your mind, and come to rely upon that guidance at will.
Your meditations will become a special form of assistance to you. Go there often and invite your partner to meditate with you as well. You will never be misled. Your higher self, the divine presence that is always with you, is on purpose and will guide you in the direction you seek once you remove the doubt and make contact.
Much of what you have read here may be difficult for you at first, because all of us are much more comfortable in assessing the quality of relationships by focusing on others in our lives. If only they would change (the thinking almost always goes), our relationship would be perfect! The emphasis here has been on your spirituality and your willingness to imagine and create perfectly loving, giving, magical relationships. Thomas Crum’s description, from The Magic of Conflict, serves as a fitting summary to this subject:
Powerful relationships arise when two centered individuals commit themselves to unconditionally love one another and to support each other’s growth toward their full potential. Both give freely, without selfish motives or the desire to lock the relationship into any particular form. There are no boundaries when we fully embrace each other.
Indeed, the boundaries disappear when you commit yourself to miracles. And without boundaries you have no limits to where you can go in all of your relationships. This description is most apt in understanding the spiritual partnership I have been writing about in this chapter. This can be your choice.
If you want to see how this relationship exists in its most natural state, the next time you see a mother nursing her child, know that you have all of the ingredients in that one example. I have silently sat in awe watching my wife unconditionally giving of herself to each of our infant children. A mother doesn’t get mothering lessons from any human teacher, she knows in her heart what is required to have that perfect, miraculous relationship. She gives unconditionally of her very own body so that her child might live. She asks nothing in return. She is totally connected to her child on an invisible level, and in awe of the little miracle that she holds at her breast. She knows within exactly what to do—to give without any expectations. She is willing to take the worst that the child has to give and respond only with love and affection. She looks past the inconveniences and the flaws, and has only love to offer. She is on purpose, and because mothers live at purpose we survive as human beings. Without the unconditional love that mothers feel for their young, we would all perish in a few days from neglect.
God has given us the perfect model of how to relate right from our opening moments outside of the womb. Give nothing but love. Send love even when you are sent poopy diapers, loud crying, belching, spitting up, sleepless nights and irrational behavior. Ask nothing in return for your love. Be on purpose. And the great irony is that you would, without question, lay down your life for that little person. That is how important your children are to you. Even without asking anything of them, they give you the greatest blessing it is possible to have. That is your model, and you can create the same magical, perfect relationships everywhere in your world, if you simply follow the natural intuitive awareness that is present within every cell of your being.
5
REAL MAGIC AND YOUR PROSPERITY
If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.
—MARK 9:23
I guarantee you that this will be the most unusual discussion you have ever read on the subject of prosperity. The central message here, as in the rest of this book, is on rethinking the beliefs you have been taught to treat as sacred. For a moment, put aside the beliefs you have acted upon throughout your life, and imagine in your invisible mind what it is you would like to see in your life. What is your ultimate image of prosperity for your life? How much money, how much total prosperity would you truly like to have?
Now, open your eyes and see what you have created up until now. That’s right, you have created your own financial picture, and it is precisely what you have acted upon. This is the hardest part for most people to truly understand. Most of us want to blame others or something outside of ourselves for the way our prosperity picture looks.
But you only need to look inside yourself. You can have all of the prosperity you are willing to believe in and create for yourself. St. Mark does not say some things are possible and others are impossible. He says all things are possible. Keep this in mind as you prepare to create miracles of abundance in your life. Try to imagine a state of unlimited possibilities as being possible for you.
James Allen, in the nineteenth century, wrote the following words, in As a Man Thinketh, which I committed to memory as a young man. I have them taped to my bathroom mirror and to the dashboard of my car so I can be reminded of them every day. One simple sentence that, for me, tells it all: “Circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.” Read these words over and over again until you have them committed to memory. The message of this sentence is at the very core of your ability to achieve a prosperity consciousness rather than a scarcity consciousness.
You probably will not immediately agree with this notion of our present life circumstance revealing who we are. It is easier to blame our life circumstances and it only seems proven by the poverty all around us. We feel we would be cruel to say that the circumstances of the poor reveal who they are. Surely those people did not choose such undesirable circumstances.
This well-intentioned thinking, however, allows you to hang onto your scarcity consciousness, and to defend your misery and your inability to transcend your life circumstances. We mistakenly believe that we cannot be compassionate and concerned about those in miserable circumstances while also encouraging ourselves and others to uncover any beliefs that may be contributing to the situation.
Stop and consider for a moment the potential benefits of applying this message for those who are living in the worst of circumstances. Then also consider all of the people who have shifted from a life of scarcity to one of prosperity. When you examine what it was that made the difference, without exception it includes the invisible world of beliefs and attitudes.
A radio talk show host accused me of having a cavalier attitude toward the poor when I described my philosophy on his program. My contention was that being broke is a temporary state of affairs that afflicts almost everyone at one time or another, but being poor is an attitude, a set of beliefs that gets reinforced when we shift to blaming life circumstances for the condition of poverty. One of the incoming calls in response to this radio conversation was from a physician in Washington, D.C., who had grown up in a family of thirteen children in total poverty in Jamaica. He disagreed with the host, saying:
I lived in dirt-poor conditions all of my life. I mean hungry, starving poverty. But I always had a vision of myself as a doctor. I could not lose that vision, and I would always tell my grandmother about that picture in my head. She was raising all of us on practically no income, and she always told me to never, but never, let the picture become blurred. She told me about the value of that inner picture, and that if I always kept it, and believed in it, I would only have that picture to act upon.
As I got older and finished high school, I applied to several hundred schools in premed curricula, and I was rejected over and over again, but I could not shake that picture that my grandmother helped me to have as a ragtag little boy playing with the chickens in our little hut in Jamaica. Finally I was given a conditional opportunity to enroll in a premed program in Europe, and I worked my way there and all through school.
Today I am a physician with a thriving practice. Without that vision, without that invisible picture in my mind, I could never have escaped the life of poverty that continues today for most of my brothers and sisters and all of my friends there. They live in poverty and believe that life dealt them a stacked deck, and that I was lucky. But I know better. I am living the life I pictured for myself.
And Dr. Dyer, don’t you ever let anyone dissuade you from telling the truths that you know, because you are doing much more to help those in horrible circumstances than those who buy the big lie that their lives are beyond their own control.
I cannot stop telling those truths because I too am a living, breathing example of what I am writing about. I also left a life of scarcity behind me, and I too know the singularly powerful role that my beliefs within my mind played in creating a life of prosperity. Indeed, circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him, and I encourage you to suspend any erroneous belief that this may apply exclusively to Wayne Dyer and a physician in Washington, D.C., but has nothing to do with you.
It has everything to do with you. It transcends individual lives because it involves universal laws and principles that were here long before you showed up in your current physical form. I am just reporting on what I know to be true for myself and many others. If you want to experience prosperity at a miraculous level, you must leave behind your old ways of thinking and develop a new way of imagining what is possible for you to experience in your life.
FIVE ASPECTS OF A PROSPERITY CONSCIOUSNESS
Take an inner inventory and see if the following statements are a part of your consciousness.
• There is not enough to go around.
• You have to get yours or someone else will grab it before you.
• There are only so many fish in the sea.
• You never know if opportunity will knock.
If these and similar thoughts are part of your personal inventory then probably you were taught that you are living in a world of shortages. You have been raised to believe in scarcity. The concept of lack has been embedded into your belief system.
In order to develop an inner vision of prosperity, you will have to shed this old vision of scarcity. The following five essentials of a prosperity consciousness can help you make the shift.
1. You don’t need anything else to experience prosperity. Getting rid of a scarcity consciousness means changing the inner pictures that reflect a lack in your life. You already have everything that you need in order to experience a lifetime of prosperity. Truly you are not going to get “it” all, you are “it” all already. Prosperity is first and foremost a mind game. It is a set of inner invisible beliefs you carry around with you. You must know you have all that you need right now; you are lacking nothing to gain prosperity for yourself. I have always enjoyed the following story, which perfectly illustrates this principle.
A man who was ragged and appeared to be without anything in a physical sense came upon a road boss and said, “Can you help me? I need work.”
The road boss said, “Fine, take that large boulder over there and roll it up and down the hill. If you need work that will fulfill your need.”
The man said, “You don’t understand, what I really need is money.”
The boss replied, “Oh, if it is only money that you need, here is fifty dollars. But you cannot spend it.”
Again the man was perplexed. “You don’t understand, what I really need is food and fuel and clothing, not just money.”
The boss again replied, “If you are sure that this is what you need, then spend the money for food, fuel and clothing, but don’t eat the food, or burn the fuel or wear the clothing.”
The man was finally forced to look at what he really needed, which was a sense of security, peace and inner satisfaction. All totally invisible, all within the mind. All divine sustenance.
You are led to believe that the material things are reality and are providing you with what you need, while in fact they are only more matter, which is made up of more invisible space. What you need, you already have, and when you know it, and go within and create it in your mind, the divine sustenance you seek in the form of material things or money will be manifested in whatever amounts needed.
You must develop this new inner sense, and trust in the magic of believing. Your beliefs are yours, they originate with you, they are what you use (and all that you have to use) to carve out the circumstances of your physical reality. When you tell yourself otherwise, you are tapping into your scarcity consciousness and creating the very thing you most despise as your physical reality.
Trust in the power of your mind, in the knowing I have been writing since page 1 of this book,, in that divine guidance that is readily available to you, and you will have reached the first step toward manifesting the miracle of prosperity for yourself.
2. You cannot create prosperity if you believe in lacks. When you have mastered the ability to become a spiritual being as outlined in the first part of this book, you will begin to understand that who you are is located in that invisible, dimensionless realm that we call your thoughts. You have no boundaries and no limits. Understanding this means knowing that you lack absolutely nothing—all that you need for your life is already here, and was within you when you first arrived here in the physical world.
When you say to yourself, “I don’t have enough money,” or, “I don’t have enough education, talent or strength to experience prosperity,” you are operating in your mental world from a position of lack. Hence you are unable to go into the world of real magic.
To overcome this way of thinking, you will have to reeducate, or better yet, dehypnotize yourself from the lie that has been foisted upon you by every strand of our Western culture. Everything that you need, you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.
When the time arrives for you to depart this physical world, you cannot say, “Wait a minute here, I’m not ready, I am still in training, I have more schooling to attend to, I am building up my strength, I have to collect more money.” You will leave your body, and it will still weigh the same. Your life is not that body, it is not in those boundaries and those limitations. It is invisible and weightless. It lacks absolutely nothing.
Whatever you have created for your physical body in the way of material things is the result of that complete invisible mind of yours. The irony of all of this is that when you know you are already complete, you begin to motivate yourself in a totally different way.
What you have become accustomed to is called deficiency motivation. That is, you assess all of the things that are missing or deficient in your life, and then you set up a plan to repair all of those deficiencies. “I need more money, more strength, more power, more beauty, more possessions,” and so on. “When I get those things, I will have prosperity.” Thus, you set your goals and go to work at becoming prosperous. But this is a gigantic trap. You can never experience prosperity from this mind-set, because you will always be suffering from the disease of more.
When you get the money you thought you needed to be prosperous, your mind-set hasn’t been satisfied. Your mind-set is focused on more—on striving, not arriving. Thus you upgrade your number, and continue to struggle and suffer and even deny yourself in the pursuit of more. This is a common theme in our culture. Prosperity is simply impossible with deficiency motivation, in which the thought is, “I don’t have enough,” or, “Something is missing.” A central theme of this book is, “As you think so shall you be.” If your thoughts are centered on what is missing, then “what’s missing,” by definition, will have to expand. That will be your experience of this material world. What’s missing will be your trademark and your experience of your physical reality.
There is another kind of motivation, called growth motivation, and this is the trade
mark of the individual who experiences real magic in the area of prosperity. With growth motivation, you simply change around the inner thinking, and decide to do your living within a framework of completeness. The inner dialogue goes something like this: “I am whole, complete, total, fully alive in this moment. This is it! I am it all, I need no more to be happy or fulfilled. Yet I know that I will be different tomorrow. My physical reality is always changing. The molecules that made up my material self yesterday will be replaced by new molecules. The physical body that I had ten years ago is completely new in a physical sense today. But I am also something other than a mere physical collection of molecules. I am divine necessity that reaches beyond the physical. I will grow. I will become something new and grand, but no grander than I now am. Just as the sky will be different in a few hours, its present perfection and completeness is not deficient, so am I presently perfect and not deficient because I will be different tomorrow. I will grow and I am not deficient.”
With this kind of thinking, lacks are impossible. You begin to be motivated in your life by your own bliss, by your dreams, to live the life that you imagine to be your calling, your divinely specialized mission for being here, and prosperity becomes your very watchword. Abundance rains into your life. The universe begins to provide precisely what you need, and it is not doing so to fill a lack of anything; it arrives in your life in the precise amount necessary to help you fulfill your dreams. When you no longer feel you are lacking something, you can live the life you know is perfect for you, and then, more and more of the symbols of prosperity (money, stuff, power, and so on) seem to arrive in your life. A simplified summary of this is: More is less, less is more.
Real Magic Page 17