The emphasis is on the word cognitive. This means to think. And this is precisely what you can and will do to create your magical personality with all its unique characteristics. You overcome the big lie—that is, the idea that you cannot help the way you are—by and through magical thinking. That magical thinking will lead you to being exactly the kind of person that you choose for yourself.
CREATING YOUR OWN MAGICAL PERSONALITY
As you now know, this entire program of creating miracles revolves around the simple premise that you become in the physical world that which you create in your invisible world. Here are the six keys to making yourself into the person that you choose for the purpose of fulfilling your heroic mission here.
1. YOUR PERSONALITY What would you like to be able to say about your own unique personality? Create a fantasy in your mind and imagine exactly how you would most like to be. Rather than looking at what you see now, look to what you would truly like to enjoy as your personality. What level of confidence would you like to exhibit as you meet with other people in all walks of life? Would you like to be more assertive? Less inward and contemplative, or more so? More loving and gentle? More or less vulnerable? More tender? Less anxious and nervous? Create in your mind a picture of the kind of personality that would serve you best.
For now, just know that all of these inner imaginings can be translated into physical behavior, for that is precisely what you have been doing all along, ever since you showed up here in the human form that you occupy. You have been imagining yourself as more or less confident, more or less nervous, and so on. Even if you weren’t aware of it, that is how your personality got shaped. You are acting upon those inner visions all the time. When you know rather than doubt that you can elect the personality that is best for fulfilling your purpose here, and you trust in your ability to be that person both in a spiritual and a physical sense, then you will create the real magic that will transform your present life. You will literally become that personality that you could only fantasize about, and you will adopt physical behaviors that will reflect your miraculous new inner vision.
2. YOUR TALENT For a moment, visualize the optimal talent that you would like to have. Simply see yourself in possession of that illusive commodity that we have come to call talent. Talent is thought of generally as some God-given innate ability that allows some to achieve at higher levels than others. Mozart had talent, some mystical gift handed to him by God. Michael Jordan has talent. Baryshnikov has talent. We can agree on those who have this thing called talent, but we cannot define it.
Let’s look at it another way. Talent is really a quality that is defined through comparison. Without others to compare Mozart or Michael Jordan with, we have no talent concept. If those two individuals simply performed in their own personal ways, fulfilling their own purpose in their particular areas, and were seen as individuals not in competition with anyone else, then we would not be using a concept like talent to describe them. Talent, by this definition, would apply to everyone.
But it is almost impossible for those of us raised in the West to conceive of such an idea. How else can we judge people? And judge is the operative word here. You do it to yourself all the time. You judge yourself and the relative merits of your talents based upon how others around you perform. Your talent in any particular area is simply what you believe about yourself and how you have compared yourself with the performance of others. You have accepted the lie that some people are more or less talented than others. But you can shift your inner awareness to a new level. You can begin to say to yourself, “I am as talented as I have chosen to become, and while I admire and enjoy the performances of others, their actions say nothing about what I can or cannot achieve.”
A line from Learned Optimism describes this awareness: “A composer can have all the talent of a Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing.” Mozart, even as a four-year-old, believed in his ability to compose. Baryshnikov goes on stage believing first and foremost that he can twirl and move like a flying angel; Michael Jordan, as he jumps into the stratosphere, first and foremost believes that he can soar, and then his body fulfills his belief. Even more than believing, they all know, and their miraculous feats flow from that intention of knowing. This is talent!
Needless to say, the physical body you showed up in will have an effect on your performance in this physical world. Your choice to excel in any given area will be based upon your own personal interests. You very likely are not interested in being a professional basketball player if you are living in a five-foot, three-inch body. But if you did have that interest and knew that you could do it, and even dunk a basketball in the process, if this were your knowing, then you would act upon that belief and make it happen. And if you do not believe me, then have a conversation with Spud Webb, who won the slam dunk contest in the National Basketball Association in just that sort of body!
Your talent, like everything else about you, is a function of the invisible force that flows through your body. It is not in your hands, your genes or any part of your physical apparatus. It is in the force that flows through all of your being.
This is difficult to accept when you have been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe that some have talent and others don’t. But you can change the toss of the cosmic dice and create the level of talent that you and only you need to fulfill your purpose here. Stop structuring your life upon a need to be better than someone else. Instead, examine your purpose in life and then know that you have all that you need right now in the way of talent to create the miracle in your life that you seek.
Read the following words of Jane Roberts from The Nature of Personal Reality. They apply to your own personal talent level as well as everything else about yourself.
If you are ill you may say, “I did not want to be sick,” or if you are poor, “I did not want to be poor,” or if you are unloved, “I did not want to be lonely.” Yet for your own reasons you began to believe in illness more than health, in poverty more than abundance, in loneliness rather than affection.
I would add that you may say you want to have more talent, yet for your own reasons you began to believe in your absence of talent rather than the talent you do have. When you begin to know rather than doubt your talent, you will discover the necessary physical abilities to carry out your purpose.
3. YOUR INTELLIGENCE How smart would you like to be? How does the label of genius next to your name feel? Would you like to raise your IQ and possess the intellectual skills to outthink those around you? Would it take a miracle for you to be smarter intellectually than you already are? It is in this area of the imaginary IQ that many people lead a life of illusion. Rid yourself of the belief that some magical number attached to your mind power limits your capabilities and achievements as a human being. The best definition of IQ is: Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.
You are not a number. You are a soul that is numberless and infinite. The capacities of your inner self are unlimited because it has no boundaries. Test makers and test users of all descriptions would like you to believe the opposite, so they circulate this kind of misinformation within the culture. “You cannot change your IQ, it is fixed and it determines what you can and cannot do in life.” But think about this for a moment.
These tests, which supposedly measure something abstract called intelligence, were devised by people who want to sell their instruments, who want to slot people into compartments, who want to restrict people from attending certain schools, who want to set up a practice for the purpose of giving out these numbers to parents. They are physical-world instruments that attempt to deter people from achieving their purpose in life. They are silly, absurd procedures that give people some kind of external number to hold on to and explain their levels of success or lack of success in the material world.
Let me give you two examples from my own life to illustrate this point. I was once invited to take an examination to measure
my intelligence in reading skills, and the test makers had used several paragraphs from my book Your Erroneous Zones. I was instructed to read the paragraph and then answer five questions based upon my interpretation of the material. I read the paragraph that I had written myself, and then I proceeded to answer the questions. I received a score of 80 percent on the five questions. The only question that I failed to answer correctly was number 5, the “intent of the author.” My IQ was lowered because I was unable to correctly identify the intent of the author, when I was the author!
On another occasion when I was still a college student, I took an examination in a course on modern American poetry. The instructor told me that my interpretation of the poem in question was incorrect and he consequently lowered my grade considerably. The poet was alive at the time, teaching at a large Midwestern university. I decided to write to the poet and send him my interpretation, of his poem, which I thought was insightful and “correct.” I received a beautiful letter in response, and the poet told me that my views on his poetry reflected his own. He indicated that I too had the mind of a poet and suggested I pursue writing my own poetry. I took my interpretation of the poem, along with the letter from the poet, to a scheduled consultation with my English instructor, feeling certain that I would have my “poetry IQ” raised as a result. My instructor refused to raise my grade. His response was, “Sometimes poets don’t really know how to interpret their own poems. Your grade stands.”
Consider examples such as these as you evaluate your own IQ. Know that there are no accidents in this perfect universe. Know that your purpose is beyond anything that can be measured with scientific measurements. Know for certain that one person’s ability to solve the rhyming scheme of an Elizabethan sonnet, and another’s capacity for understanding calculus formulations, is simply what it is. There is no need for comparison or sliding scales.
Your IQ is an illusion. You can change that number around drastically by changing around what is on the tests. Is the person who can fine-tune an automobile less intelligent than a person who can solve a quadratic equation? Is the classroom teacher, dressed in a suit and tie, who explains environmental matters from an intellectual perspective, more intelligent than a young environmentally aware person who chooses to learn firsthand by living in the woods? Who decided on this business of IQ? Why should we label everyone in our culture with another number—a number that is misinterpreted by the person receiving the number, and by those who are issuing it as well?
You are as capable as you need to be to fulfill your purpose. Your intelligence is infinite. You must know that there is an absurdity in this assignment of an IQ number to people. Intelligence is about the mind. The mind is without boundaries. But IQ numbers are all about boundaries. There is no way to quantify something that is without dimensions. If you want to experience the miracle of having genius-level intelligence, then change around those inner voices that have convinced you of your limitations because of your intellect.
Almost twenty years ago, in Your Erroneous Zones, I redefined intelligence. I stand by that definition to this day: “A truer barometer of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.” You are a genius! When you know that you have the intellectual capacity to create your own happiness, and when you know whom or what to consult, then you are your own genius.
Certainly you can improve upon your ability to do any intellectual task. You can improve your arithmetic and reading skills. You can learn anything that you put your mind to. What you have or have not learned up until this moment is a function of the choices that you have been making, not some innate incapacity determined by a number assigned to you by those who have their own self-interest at heart in their numbering game. Know this about your intelligence level and keep it uppermost in your infinite, boundless, numberless mind. You are a spiritual being first and foremost. And you cannot put a number on that.
4. YOUR HABITS AND CUSTOMS Would you like to be able to change some of the things that you find yourself doing repeatedly but that do not serve you? Would you like to rid yourself of self-defeating habits? Be free of customs that you dislike and feel a victim of? Use your magical powers of inner persuasion to challenge everything about yourself. Your personality is made up of the hundreds of habitual ways that you conduct the daily physical affairs of your life.
If you are leading an existence of television and inactivity that you dislike, but that you can’t shake, you can create the miracle that you seek. You can change around your daily humdrum habits and get yourself fully involved in life, regardless of your income level or circumstances. Remember, circumstances do not make a man, they reveal him.
A neighborhood within a few miles of my home has the highest unemployment rate in the state of Florida. Something close to 75 percent of the people are out of work. Yet, as I drive through the neighborhood I notice broken glass on the lawns, litter everywhere, grass that is not trimmed, houses that are not clean or painted. Why? If 75 percent of the people are unemployed, wouldn’t it seem logical that you would see these people at least picking up the trash and broken glass with their abundance of free time? But you don’t. You see people sitting around doing nothing. The circumstances of their lives have revealed how they have chosen to live. It costs nothing to pick up and clean up, yet this is not done, because those habits have become the ways of dealing with their circumstances. Your habits reveal you! They say something about how you have chosen to live your life and to use your powerful mind. The same invisible force that runs through those who do pick up the broken glass and manage to work and support their families runs through those who make the opposite choices. It is in every one of us. Some tap into it; others ignore it and then blame their circumstances for the habits and customs of their lives.
Being unhappy is a habit. Being depressed is a habit. Being lazy is a habit. Being limited is a habit. These, and many other personality traits, result from the way in which you use your mind. There are many many people, including this writer, who have spent a large portion of their lives with very little in the way of material possessions, yet their habit was not to be depressed about it. There are many in such circumstances who have a habit of choosing happiness over despair, since these are inner, not outer, processes. And those who do manage to choose self-enhancing habits are almost always those who transcend their circumstances of scarcity and create more abundance in their lives.
Whatever habits and customs you find yourself blindly obeying, you can change in a moment when you become a spiritual being first and a material being second. You have the power to change those things that do not work for you, that you have come to call troublesome habits or customs. If you believe this, and know it within yourself, you will find your physical self automatically following a new course. Learning to think in nonhabitual ways is the essence of overcoming personality traits that no longer serve you. You need not stay conditioned and hypnotized in your current state if it does not serve your purpose.
You may have adopted a habit of allowing others to influence you or push you around, or of being a servant to others at the expense of fulfilling your own destiny. These are habits that you have adopted by teaching others in your life exactly what you are willing to put up with. You can rid yourself of habits that come from allowing others to manipulate you. You can rid yourself of “ingrained personality traits,” which are not truly ingrained at all. They are habitual ways that you have chosen for yourself. The way to creating a miracle for yourself in which you are not a victim of others, your circumstances or yourself is in shifting your inner world and creating, in that private space, room for a purposeful, spiritually fulfilled human being.
5. YOUR AGING Imagine for yourself the ultimate miracle, a slowing down or an elimination of the aging process. Now there is an outright, uncategorical miracle! You can have an enormous impact on the state of aging in your body. Here is my friend Dr. Deepak Chopra on the subject in his classic work, Perfect Health:
Aging seems so complicated that it is difficult even to pin down exactly what it is. A typical liver cell performs five hundred separate functions, which gives it five hundred ways to go wrong. All of these possibilities constitute the ways in which it can age. On the other hand, the view that aging is complex may be wrong. Despite the thousand waves that bring it in, the ocean tide is a single phenomenon, driven by a single force. The same may be true of human aging, although we see it as hundreds of waves; disconnected aches and pains, new wrinkles around the eyes and deeper smile marks at the corner of the mouth … and innumerable other minor inconveniences.
Try to get this new perspective that Dr. Chopra outlines brilliantly in his chapter titled “Aging Is a Mistake.” While everyone succumbs to the aging process, the question of significance is: Do we have to? He points out that DNA, which controls all the cellular functions, is virtually invulnerable to wear and tear. It has survived without even a millimeter of aging for six hundred million years—at the minimum. The very stuff of your being is simply ageless. Yet we age. Why?
The ancient sages called the aging process a mistake of the intellect. Aging is the forgetting of how to make things right within a cell. It is not normal, it simply is a learned way of being. The mistake of the intellect is in identifying exclusively with the physical body and coming to know that one has to experience the aging process. The mind begins to prepare for aging as soon as it is capable of intellectualizing. You have seen it all around you, you have read about it and that is all you know. Therefore you prepare your body for its own self-destruction.
The way out of this trap, the real magic that is available to you, is located, as is everything else, in your invisible self. Your mind. You can absolutely refuse to let an old person into your body. This is your own garage that you use to temporarily park your soul. You can change around your inner perspective and literally affect each and every cell of your body. Your invisible self, your mind, is not located only in your brain. It is your spiritual consciousness and it is in every single cell of your being. The world is in you, so to speak, and if you can work your mind in a genuinely magical sense, you can strongly affect the aging process of the cells composed of indestructible DNA. If, as you read these words, you are filled with doubt about that possibility for yourself, then of course your doubt will affect each and every cell in your body, including the DNA memory for renewing itself.
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