Authors: Pam Grout
Tags: #ebook, #book
Subtle energies, thoughts, emotions, and consciousness play the starring roles in our life experiences, but because they’re invisible, we haven’t attempted to understand them or use them in our favor. To change the world is a simple matter of changing these expectations and beliefs. It’s truly that easy. To bring something into the physical world requires focusing not on what we see, but on what we
want
to see.
Good, Good, Good, Good Vibrations
“’El Niño of human consciousness’ has arrived.”
—D
IANNE
C
OLLINS, AUTHOR OF
D
O
Y
OU
Q
UANTUM
T
HINK?
Okay, just say it: “How can something as simple as a thought influence the world?” Let me just point out that a hundred years ago nobody would have believed songs sung by a bunch of
American Idol
contestants could pass through brick, glass, wood, and steel to get from a transmitter tower to your television set, either. Nobody would have believed a cell phone no bigger than a deck of cards would allow you to talk to your sister 2,000 miles away.
Your thoughts, like the 289 TV channels and like your voice on the cell phone, are vibrational waves. When you hear Eminem rapping about his daughter Hailie, your eardrum is catching a vibrational sound wave. When you see Brad Pitt’s cane or Madonna’s single leather glove (accessories they sported at the 2012 Golden Globes), you’re seeing patterns of vibrational light waves.
And that’s what your thoughts are—vibrational energy waves that interact and influence the FP. Every thought you have, have ever had, or ever will have creates a vibration that goes out into the FP, extending forever. These vibrations meet other vibrations, crisscrossing in an incredible maze of energy. Get enough energy together and it clumps into matter. Remember what Einstein said—matter is formed out of energy.
The field of potentiality simply follows the energy you send out. And your thought vibrations draw other vibrations that match. Here’s one small example: A few years ago, I wanted a potato masher. I didn’t mention it to anyone. I just made a mental note:
Next time you’re at Walmart, buy a potato masher.
That very night, my friend Wendy, who was cleaning out her drawers, stopped by with a couple of no-longer-needed cooking utensils, including a potato masher. Another time, I decided I needed more laughter in my life. Within a couple weeks, I began dating Todd, a funny co-worker who eventually became a comedian.
The coincidences we see in our lives are just energy and the FP at work. Most of the time, we employ energy inadvertently, totally oblivious to the fact that what we think, say, and do makes a difference. Consequently, we activate this limitless power to follow a default program that makes no use of imagination or possibility.
People think Jesus is the be-all and end-all, because he was so good at manipulating energy and matter. But, as he so poignantly pointed out (although these aren’t his exact words), “You, too, are da’ man.”
I’m a single mom, not exactly the best “stereotype” in which to be cast. Like being black or Jewish, it brings up certain preconceived notions. People automatically expect me to be poor, maybe on welfare.
While that’s certainly one of the available channels, I prefer to watch a different channel. I prefer to focus on a different reality.
Here’s what it says on my website: “Pam Grout is a world traveler, a loving mother, a best-selling author, a millionaire, and an inspiring witness to everyone she meets.” I started focusing on those things 20 years ago, before I’d ever had a child, before I became a world traveler or an author, and for that matter, before I even liked myself all that much. Focusing on what I wanted obviously worked, because now I can proudly say that all but one of the above are true. I’ll let you guess which one is yet to manifest. So far, I’ve written 16 books, two screenplays, a live soap opera, and enough magazine articles that I haven’t starved in 20 years without a 9-to-5 job. I maintain a travel blog
(
www.georgeclooneyslepthere.com
)
that has taken me to all seven continents. I’ve written about everything from bungee jumping in New Zealand to carpet buying in Morocco to picking coffee in Nicaragua.
I have yet to jump out of an airplane, but I have to save something for my 90th birthday.
The First Step in Spiritual Enlightenment: Give Up Your Powerful Attachment to Conventional Reality
“We are all captives of a story.”
—D
ANIEL
Q
UINN, AUTHOR OF
I
SHMAEL
Reality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that everything you think is real is not. Physicists, for going on 100 years now, have not known what to make of the fact that Newton’s classical view of the world has absolutely no bearing on the way the world works at its core. The subatomic realm so defies all reason and logic that most scientists, scared to endanger their academic credentials, have more or less ignored the fact that life is nothing like what we pretend it is.
In fact, it’s so freaky—particles popping up out of nowhere, time slowing down and speeding up, particles reacting and communicating with each other even when separated by thousands of miles—that the only thing scientists have done with this information so far is develop technology that allows us to blow each other up, send text messages, receive cell-phone messages, and nuke our Hungry-Man TV dinners.
Even the two main fundaments of physical reality—space and time—are not what they seem. These two physical mainstays are nothing but extremely convincing optical illusions. Physicists like Bernard d’Espagnat, recent winner of the $1.4 million Templeton Prize, tell us it’s high time we trade in our old formulation of natural law for a radically different, more accurate view of reality: namely, that consciousness itself creates the material world.
Even though every physicist on the planet knows about the freaky universe where matter pops into existence from nothing at all and where electrons can jump from one orbit to another without traveling across intervening space, most have chosen to ignore it, to shrug their shoulders, and to employ the old tween standby “Whatever!”
It’s not that they’re in total denial. As I mentioned, they’ve used the new physics to develop lasers, transistors, superconductors, and atom bombs. But they can’t even begin to explain how this quantum world works. As physicist James Trefil observed, “We’ve encountered an area of the universe our brains just aren’t wired to understand.”
A few brave physicists are starting to acknowledge that their precious assumptions may be wrong. They’re admitting that the fundamental tenets of material reality just don’t hold up. Some are even brave enough to admit that consciousness itself creates the physical world. (As Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, a physicist popularly known as Dr. Quantum, says, “It boils down to this—the universe doesn’t exist without a perceiver of that universe.")
All I have to say is, “About time.”
A Course in Miracles
, a self-study program in spiritual psychology that I’ve been practicing and teaching for 25 years, has always advocated the idea that consciousness creates the material world. It says we humans decide in advance how we’re going to experience life, that we choose beforehand what we want to see.
The problem is, we all look at the world with a giant chip on our shoulder. All we need to do to change the course of our crummy lives is to get over our ongoing grudge against the world, to actively see and expect a different reality. As it is now, we devote all our time and attention (our consciousness, if you will) to things we do not want.
But it’s nothing more than a bad habit. And like any bad habit, it can be changed with conscious and deliberate effort.
It Is What It Isn’t
“Man’s concept of his world built on the experience of the five senses is no longer adequate and in many cases no longer valid.”
—S
HAFICA
K
ARAGULLA
, M.D.,
T
URKISH-BORN PSYCHIATRIST
Right now, the planet you call home is spinning at a rate of roughly 930 miles per hour. It’s orbiting the sun at an astonishing 66,486 miles per hour. But unless you just polished off a couple pitchers of beer, you probably aren’t aware of any such movement. That’s just one tiny example of how we distort reality.
Turns out that almost all the concepts and judgments we take for granted are distortions. Very early on—say, sometime around birth—our minds establish a pattern of perception and then proceed to filter out everything else. In other words, we only “experience” things that jibe with our very limited perception.
A girl from the Philippines told me it was weeks, if not months, after she arrived in the United States before she noticed that some people here had red hair, including people she knew and dealt with on a regular basis. Red hair was inconsistent with what she had been conditioned to see and expect. So for several months, she was subjectively blind to red hair, seeing it as the brunette of her culture.
Scientists now know the brain receives 400 billion bits of information each second. To give you some idea of just how much information that is, consider this: It would take nearly 600,000 average-size books just to print 400 billion zeros. Needless to say, that’s a heck of a lot of reality. So what do we do? We start screening. We start narrowing down.
I’ll take that bit of information over there, and let’s see—this one fits nicely with my ongoing soap opera about the opposite sex.
When all is said and done, we’re down to 2,000 measly bits of information. Go ahead and take a bow, because even that’s pretty impressive. We’re talking 2,000 bits of information each and every second. But here’s the problem. What we choose to take in is only one-half of one-millionth of a percent of what’s out there.
Let’s pretend that each dot of a pen point is one bit of information. I’ve been practicing, and the most dots I can reasonably make in one second is five. But let’s be generous and assume you’re a better pen dotter than I am—let’s pretend you can make ten dots per second. Again, we’re assuming each dot is a bit of information. To make as many dots as your brain processes in one second takes nearly three and a half minutes at your highly superior rate of ten dots per second. But if your brain were processing all the available information (400 billion dots), it would take 821 years!
Our brains continually sift through the possibilities and pick which bits of information to “see” and believe. Out of sheer laziness, the stuff we choose to perceive—and make no mistake … it
is
a choice—is stuff we already know. It’s stuff we decided on way back when. We see, feel, taste, touch, and smell not the real world, but a drastically condensed version of the world, a version that our brains literally concoct. The rest zooms by without recognition. John Maunsell, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, says, “People imagine they’re seeing what’s really there, but they’re not.”
Once your brain decides which bits to let in, it builds bridges between various nerve cells, interlacing nerve fibers to create neural pathways. The average human has 100 billion nerve cells, each with innumerable extensions, so different highways get built in each brain. The map of neural pathways in your brain and, say, Johnny Depp’s brain are as different as the maps of Wisconsin and Rhode Island.
Once you get the pathways set up, you quit traveling the rest of the country. Interstate 70 in my home state of Kansas makes for a perfect metaphor. Believe it or not, Kansas—the state
The Wizard of Oz
portrayed in black and white—actually contains lots of geological landmarks. There’s a miniature Grand Canyon in the northwest corner, for example, and a huge seven-story limestone formation called Castle Rock near the town of Quinter. But since people traveling through Kansas rarely leave I-70, nobody has a clue that these geological formations exist. They’ve literally bypassed all the beautiful, worthwhile stuff and come to the erroneous conclusion that Kansas is flat and boring. But it’s not reality.
Like those highway planners who put I-70 on the flattest, quickest, and easiest route, we build our neural pathways on the least complicated routes—the ones we’ve traveled so many times before. But this doesn’t show us reality. Not even close. We don’t begin to see all that is there—only three and a half minutes, compared to 821 years.
The roads and highways of our brains get set up pretty early. When we’re born, every possibility exists. Let’s take language, for example. Within every newborn is the ability to pronounce every sound in every single language. The potential is there for the
r
rolling of the Spanish language. It’s also there for those guttural German diphthongs.
But very early on, our brains lay down neural pathways that mesh with the sounds we hear every day, eliminating other sounds from other languages.
With the possible exception of Barbara Walters, pretty much everyone who speaks English can pronounce the following phrase: “Rolling Rock really rouses Roland Ratinsky.” But when people from China try to learn English, they no longer have the neural pathways to properly say their
r
’s, so that’s why “fried rice” becomes “flied lice.” Just so no one thinks I’m ethnocentric, I should probably add that I’ve tried pronouncing some of those guttural German words only to discover that my German neural pathways have been shot to hell and back.
Perhaps the best example of how your mind creates its own virtual-reality game is the everyday, garden-variety dream. When Morley Safer showed up on your doorstep last night asking all those embarrassing questions, it seemed pretty darn real. But once the alarm clock went off, Morley and that virtual
60 Minutes
interview popped like the flimsy soap bubble it was.
Our neural pathways establish reruns of what has gone on before. Like the three-year-old who insists on watching
The Little Mermaid
over and over and over again, we cling to our warped illusions with a tenacious grip.
Get your bloody hands off my illusion!
Even though it makes us miserable, we prefer to place our faith in the disaster we have made.