Entries from February 2010 ↓

“What strange beings we are!” noted the 13th Century mystic Rumi, “That sitting in Hell at the bottom of the dark, we are afraid of our own immortality!” Perhaps it is actually the power to choose our immortality, as well as everything from our personal healing to the peace of our world, that truly frightens us!

A growing body of scientific evidence suggests that it is us —our consciousness— that holds the key to life and even reality itself! In 1967 the pioneering physicist Konrad Zuse married the ideas of consciousness with modern technology and proposed that our universe works like a massive consciousness computer. And just as every computer translates “Input-commands” into “Output-results,” our cosmic consciousness computer appears to do precisely the same thing! When we translate our deepest beliefs into the reality of our world, we are literally re-writing the code that makes the universe appear as it does.

Living In A Participatory Universe

A series of breathtaking discoveries has given us a powerful new way to think of our role in the universe. Rather than the conventional view that suggests we are passive observers, living a brief moment of time in a creation that already exists, the discoveries suggest that it is actually consciousness itself that is responsible for the existence of the universe! Perhaps the most revolutionary discovery supporting this idea, is the scientific fact that when we look at the stuff our world is made of — tiny quantum particles such as an electron, for example — the very act of us watching that electron changes the way it behaves in our presence. What’s more, the longer we look, the more it changes! In 1998, scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science documented this phenomenon showing that “the greater the amount of ‘watching,’ the greater the observer’s influence on what actually takes place.” (Nature, Feb. 26, 1998) Citing such experiments, Princeton University physicist John Wheeler suggests that we not only play a role in the creation of our everyday world, but we play the prime role in what he calls a “participatory universe.” Wheeler states that we can no longer think of ourselves merely as onlookers who have no effect on the world around us, because it is impossible to simply watch. If we are alive and conscious, then we are affecting our world. “The old word ‘observer,’” he says, “simply has to be crossed off the books…and we must put in the new word ‘participator!” The key to Wheeler’s proposition is the word “participatory.” In a participatory universe, you and I are part of the equation. We are both creating the events of our lives, as well as the experiencers of what we create. Both are happening at the same time! In other words, we are like artists expressing our deepest passions, fears, dreams, and desires through the living essence of a mysterious quantum canvas. The difference between us and conventional artists, however, is that we are the canvas, as well as the images upon the canvas. We are the tools as well as the artists using the tools. And just as artists refine an image until it is just right in their minds, we may think of ourselves as perpetual artists, building a creation that is ever changing and never ending. Through our artist’s palette of beliefs, judgments, emotions, and prayers, we find ourselves in relationships, jobs, and situations of support and betrayal that play out with different people in different places. What a beautiful, bizarre, and powerful concept.

Living from the Answer
From the perspective of us participating in an ever-changing universe, the solution to any condition is a change in attitude and belief. And this is the great secret of propelling our heart’s desires from the possibility of imagination, to the reality of our everyday lives. The key is our ability to feel as if our dreams have already come to life, our prayers already answered, and live from that feeling. There is a subtle, and yet powerful difference between working toward a result, and feeling from that result. When we work toward something, we embark upon an open-ended and never-ending journey. While we may identify milestones, and set goals to get us closer to our accomplishment, in our mind we are always “on our way” to the goal, rather than in the experience of accomplishing our goal. This is precisely why Neville’s invitation to “enter the image” of our heart’s desire and “think from it” is so powerful in our lives. In the ancient studies of martial arts, we see a beautiful metaphor in the physical world for precisely the way this principle works in consciousness. When martial artists choose to break a concrete block as a demonstration of focus, for example, the very last thing in their minds is the place where their hand will touch that block. The key is to place our focus upon the completed act: the healing already accomplished, or the brick already broken. As a student of the martial arts, I was taught to do this by focusing on a point in space that is beyond the bottom of the block. The only way that my hand could be at that point was if it had already passed through the brick. In this way, I was thinking from the completion, rather than how hard it would be to get to the completion. I was feeling the joy of what it feels like to accomplish the act, rather than all of the things that must happen before I could be successful. This simple example offers a powerful analogy for precisely the way that consciousness seems to work. And this is the great secret that has been protected and preserved for us in wisdom of our past. From the monasteries of Egypt and Tibet to the forgotten texts of our most cherished traditions we are reminded that we are part of, rather than separate from, the world around us. As part of everything we see, we have the power to participate — not control or manipulate — but to consciously chart the course of our lives and our world. Please don’t be deceived by the simplicity of contemporary philosopher Neville Goddard’s words when he suggests that all we need to do is to “assume the feeling of our wish fulfilled.” In a participatory universe of our own making, why would we expect that peace, healing, and a long and healthy life should be any more difficult

http://www.greggbraden.com/interviews-and-articles/articles/

God said:
The fat is in the fire. Your life has started, and it is continuing. Your life started as it started. It started where it did. It started when it did. It started in one family and not another. Your early life was the way it was and not another.

And now your life starts anew. At every moment, your life starts anew.

You may be attached to your beginnings and the sequences of events, and yet I must tell you that you are not beholden to them. The past was a configuration then. You can have a new configuration now. In fact, you must step out of the past and leave it behind you. The past has past. Now you can make life as you desire. Choose the radius of your life. Design it now.

No matter what your past, today is a starting-off point.

Whatever your havoc, you can drop it off now. Whatever your griefs, you can leave them behind. You had the suffering. You don’t have to relive it. You do not have to live up to it or down to it. You are not tied to it. You can let go of it. You can choose to.

The love and happiness from the past that have crumbled have often turned into sadness. You can not really hold on to the happinesses of the past try as you may. Earth mothers and fathers do not stay to nurture you forever. Brothers and sisters move away. Beautiful bodies age. Life moves fast, and there are changes right before your eyes.

And so, beloveds, treat the past, pleasant or painful, the same. The past is all a day that has passed. Today is a new day. I would like it to be a sunny day for you. Why not a sunny day? The past does not have to linger. The past is not meant to be a cloud over you nor an umbrella nor is it to be wonderfulness that leaves you longing for it.

Once you had a fabulous patent leather coat. You don’t even know where it went, and yet you cling to memories of that beautiful patent leather coat.

Turn now to make new memories that you will also have to let go of. The past is no more. On Earth, the present is but a fleeting moment. Grab it before it is gone. Grab today before it is gone. Grab it, but don’t hold it tight. Catch the bus to Eternity, beloveds. Catch the bus that is going in the direction you want to go. Take a new bus, and see where it takes you.

The bus has a sign on it. Take the one that says This Moment. In smaller print, you will see This Bus to Eternity.

And if the bus you ride on doesn’t take you to Eternity, never mind. There is another bus tomorrow.

You have to take a chance. Going the way you went before is also taking a chance, and the odds are not in your favor.

Take a new turn. Put your foot in a new place, and then pivot. Lift your foot, and set it down somewhere it has never been before. That is what is happening anyway, beloveds. The Earth is spinning, and the sun appears to move with it. Nothing stays in the same place. The kaleidoscope of life keeps turning.

You cannot keep going through the same revolving door and get anywhere. I think I’ve made My point.

Face forward, and greet life with your two arms opened wide. Life, like a beautiful bird, will fly to you in all its brilliant color.

Come, fly away with Me.

http://www.heavenletters.org/the-bus-to-eternity.html

One of my favorite quotes is from psychologist Carl Rogers, who said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself as I am, then I can change.”
That statement has always had a sort of zen quality to me. It also continues to be a piece of the puzzle in my mind relating to things I hear or read about making peace with where I am. A while back someone wrote to me, wondering if I really buy into this business about the best way to improve a bad situation being to let go of needing things to be different in order to feel better.

Always a sucker for a good paradox, I asked the Shower Team for neither the first nor likely the last time, “How do we let go of needing a bad situation to get better? How are we supposed to make peace with where we are when where we are sucks?”

Making peace with where you are doesn’t mean what you often assume that it means. You hear that and you interpret it to mean that you’re just supposed to be resigned to whatever fate you feel is being thrust upon you or that you are just supposed to grin like an idiot and babble affirmations no matter how miserable you are. A much better way to say it is, “Make peace with YOU—wherever you are.” Because the point is, that YOU are truly fine . . . truly okay . . . truly blessed . . . truly loved and supported . . . no matter where you are. No matter what you’ve created. No matter what kind of mess you feel you or someone else has made. No matter how long or hard you’ve been struggling. No matter how beaten up or abandoned you feel. No matter how worthless or stupid or inept or foolish you feel—or believe others feel that you are.
Too often what most of you try to do is to improve how you feel from the outside in. You observe the conditions or circumstances that you are experiencing and your knee jerk reaction is to say, “I’ll feel better when that’s different.” Or “I’ll feel better when this is no longer the case.” So you change your hair style or your wardrobe. You go on a diet. You buy a new house. You quit your job. You leave your mate. You try to extract what you think is the source of your discomfort. You move to another neighborhood or city or state or country. Some of you would head for another planet if you could—always trusting in the same illusion: that it’s where you are that makes the difference. “If I can just be over there, not here—everything will be fine. I’LL be fine as soon as I’m over there.”
It is very hard for you to hear us say, “It doesn’t matter where you are” and understand it much less believe it. You hear words like “wherever you go, there are you are,” and you laugh and you recognize some truth in it but then you go right back to shopping for your new clothes or your new partner or your new career or a better doctor or accountant . . . What we want so much for you to understand is that, while these externals may distract you from how bad you feel or in some cases, even allow you to take the much longer route to feeling better about yourself—there is a much simpler, swifter way for you to get your bearings and to feel the power that you always have to feel better no matter what’s going on in your life.
The simple truth that you have such a hard time hearing and believing is that YOU are never really a mess. YOU never need a makeover. YOU never need to be anything other than who YOU really are. And until you allow yourself to be at peace with YOU—apart from any circumstance or condition or situation . . . until you understand that YOU are blessed and adored and supported and perfect as YOU are, then you will be constantly striving for some other way to be. You will be constantly trying to remodel your life based on the mistaken belief that how your house looks to passers by has anything to do with how it feels as a home. You can create a showplace that anyone looking at from the outside in will admire and applaud. And it will still feel like an empty, hollow, cold, lonely space until you understand that YOU are the life in it. You are the warmth in it. You are the spirit that inhabits your life and makes it livable.
What you must understand is that YOU are your home, that peace is a choice you make . . . . . it is a recognition that what matters is how you feel in your skin and in your heart . . . and that everything you really want is right there where you are.
We understand that peace is typically not the first prayer you pray when you are in pain. You want relief. You want improvement. You want to feel better. What we keep trying to help you see is that you can begin to feel better from the inside out. A step as simple as deciding that you’re going to focus on feeling better rather than on how bad you feel is a powerful step in that direction. In the midst of your dissatisfaction or distress, take a minute. Take a breath, or two, or three . . . And let yourself feel the subtle but distinct shift in how you feel when you even slightly move your attention from how bad you’re feeling to how much better you’d like to feel . . . when you change the object of your attention from the source of your stress to the desire for relief.
When you understand that you don’t need anything to change in order to be at peace, that there are no renovations needed, no permits to apply for, no sins to confess and atone for, no sentences to serve or fines to pay, then you are free to change anything you want, simply because you enjoy the changing of it. It becomes a game you’re free to play because it’s fun to play it . . . not an act of desperation or a deception that anything going on around you in any way determines who you really are or a driving need to match your life to something you’ve seen in a catalog or a movie or an infomercial or a sacred text or a self-help book–or for that matter, a blog. Make peace with YOU, wherever you are because if you don’t, you’ll have no real peace, no matter where you are.

I’ve certainly learned the long and hard way that I can’t move far enough away from anything that’s holding me back from feeling the way I want to feel about my life. It doesn’t prevent occasional speculation about how much happiness money might buy or the difference any number of improved conditions might make in my overall outlook. But regardless, it seems worth the effort to see how much I can like the me in the middle of whatever it is I’m not liking.

http://firstadream.com/2010/02/03/making-peace-with-where-you-are

At first they will look awful. Try to see them in a less awful light. Then try to see them in a less awful light. Then begin to appreciate some aspect of them. And in time you will discover the deliciousness of being able to love unconditionally. And then you will have come home. But you will not be dead. You will be alive in this physical body, still expanding the universe right here and now. You don’t have to croak to come into alignment with who you are. You can come into alignment with who you are anytime anywhere. It’s just takes some practice. One step at a time… There is GREAT LOVE here for you. And for now, we remain as always, eternally and joyously incomplete.

- Abraham-Hicks -

There is one viewpoint, one specific way of seeing creation – our lives, what happens in our lives, and more specifically what we see as trouble with people and incidents and events in our lives.

It would be true to say that without people, we don’t have problems. And so since there is no way of controlling others (we try to do that all the time – success ratio?) or incidents (more controlling of people) there is one thing that many of us is starting to understand through the teachings of Abraham, other non physical teachers, Wayne Dyer, Chopra and on it goes – and the one thing which enables us, truly , to finally get how our control of our worlds works (and control is possible), is understanding that THERE IS NO OUT THERE.

No out there, you really create it all – and your world appears to be outside you because that is the way your world is set up…
While we give our power away to the actors in our movie (family, friends, enemies, lovers) by trying to have them love us so that we can get them to do what we need them to do so that we can feel better, we miss the whole point….. and that is that we CAN control our lives, and the people in them – if we realize that the control is vibrational and not through action, and that we have control over that vibration. So the vibration that you send out, regulates the general vibration of your world…. And feeling good means that everyone benefits, not only you. And so focus on keeping happy, and in this way everyone and everything vibrates at that level!

There is no out there – there is only you.

© Nina Ferrell 2010