Archive for October, 2009

Newer Entries »

What Is A Prayer?

Friday, October 16th, 2009

There will be quite a few posts on the material covered in The Science Of Mind book by Earnest Holmes since there are some really interesting concepts that I would like to bring up in this blog and see what you think.

I should tell you that Ernest Holmes was not a religious individual, so when he uses the word God, it is interchangeable with the ‘Spirit’, ‘Light’, ‘Love’, ‘Universe’, ‘Energy’, ‘Source Energy’, ‘Universal Intelligence’, or any other word that you may use to describe this Source of everything.

Here is an excerpt straight from the book (pg. 28):

“Since some people have been healed through prayer, while others have not, the answer is NOT that God has responded to some but not to others, but that some have responded to God more than others. Their prayer (they thought) has responded by corresponding. The answer to prayer is in the prayer. But what is a prayer? A prayer is a movement of thought, within the mind of the one praying, along a definite line of meditation; that is, for a specific purpose.”

This builds on two previous posts, the one on how most people do not know how to correctly ask for what they want (they do not know how to pray properly), and the other on how the Universe does not play favourites. If you internalize the idea that the Universe does not like your neighbour any more than you, you will understand that you are the sole reason for why you do not have the results that you are looking for. By the same token, you are also the sole reason for already manifesting the desired results in your life.

We already talked about how the Universe does not understand words; that it understands feelings. And since feelings are often the results of our thoughts, it is vital to think correctly. This is one of the fundamental concepts, an idea that is expressed in many books, like Think And Grow Rich. So, since a prayer is simply a movement of thought, if you pray for avoidance of a certain outcome or situation, you increase your chances of manifesting it. Likewise, if you offer your thoughts to what you want, you will manifest that.

In this Science of Mind class we will learn how to do Affirmative Prayers or Mind Treatments. My understanding is that we will learn how to pray (read ‘think’) properly. I will make sure to share once we get there.

Until Monday,

V

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Neo-Spirituality, Success, Universe | No Comments »

Without The Bitter, The Sweet Ain’t As Sweet

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

In the Science of Mind class earlier this week we had a discussion on the material that we have read for that class. While not entirely ‘on subject’, one person asked a question that was of interest to me – is it necessary for us to be in captivity in order to understand freedom, be poor to appreciate wealth, or have our heart broken to know love?

I talked for a bit with the person who asked this question and learned that he did not have an answer himself. He said that he wondered whether it was necessary to experience one to know the other but realized that no one can really answer that question since all of us do experience both.

I wonder, what do you think?

From my experience, one is necessary to understand and appreciate the other, but I am too in a position where I have experienced both sides of the coin. However the reason why I am saying this is because I lived in Ukraine until I was 12, and then I moved to Canada. A few months ago I went back for a visit for the first time. The amount of wealth and prosperity that people have in Canada, as well as in the United States and Western Europe, is quite considerable.

People in Canada do not seem to have the innate feeling of wealth and prosperity and appreciation of their socioeconomic status. Most people still feel like they do not have enough and feel poor. On the other had, pretty much any person in Ukraine, and most of the world for that matter, would feel that they are living a very prosperous life if they were put into the shoes of an average Canadian.

So since people in wealthier countries still seem to feel lack when they actually are living in considerable abundance, I conclude for myself that “without the bitter, the sweet ain’t as sweet!”

Your thoughts?

Until next time,

V

Check out www.affirmationtrigger.com: your personalized affirmations sent frequently to your smart phone, FREE of charge!

Tags: ,
Posted in Psychology | No Comments »

The Universe Does Not Play Favourites

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

I mentioned last week that I have started the Science of Mind course through the Centre for Spiritual Living in Kelowna. In this course we are going through the book, The Science Of Mind, written by Earnest Holmes. I started reading it last week and found that it has a lot of though-provoking points and ideas. In the first chapter of the book, Earnest Holmes introduces a concept that the Universe does not play favourites.

The Universe has a set of physical and metaphysical laws that do not discriminate and apply equally to all, regardless of our belief in or ignorance of those laws. If you decide not to believe in gravity and step off the building, you will still hit the ground, so you being ignorant does not exclude you from gravity’s influence. Earnest Holmes brings an interesting example, saying that when you mix two given colours in given proportions, you will always get the same end colour, regardless of who is doing the mixing.

The same applies to the metaphysical – regardless of who you are and where you are from, as long as you abide by the rules of the universe, you will get the expected results. This is really liberating in a way, since many of us go through life thinking that we are not capable of achieving a result or not worthy of the things that we truly want and desire. Now that you know this, you do not need to become a different kind of person in order to achieve something – you just need to uncover these laws of the universe, internalize them, utilize and apply them, and then simply get the expected results.

Have fun with this!

Until next time,

V

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Success, Universe | 1 Comment »

Why Do We Have Trouble Taking Action

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

***

This post was supposed to go out last Friday, but I did not set it up correctly, so it was sitting in ‘drafts’ this morning. Here it is…

***

A few days ago I wrote about Knowledge vs Action – about how you can have a head full of knowledge, but if you don’t put that knowledge to good use through your actions, that knowledge is not very useful to you when it comes to changing your life. Yesterday I read a blog post about a quick 2-minute exercise to make it easier to deal with the stress of daily life, and even though I did the exercise, I felt resistance that I had to overcome in order to actually follow through.

So it makes me wonder, why do we have such hard time actually taking action? And the most interesting thing is that we have trouble even with the small, easy actions. I see myself as a person with ‘personal power’, to borrow the phrase from Tony Robbins, and I still have to overcome resistance before taking most actions. So I wanted to address the main reason for why we have trouble taking action, and that reason is FEAR.

Fear is the main reason why we are often paralyzed and do not take action, even when it is quick and easy. I like what Tony Robbins said about fear, that it is False Evidence that Appears Real. Fear is often not based on facts, since pretty much every time that I have overcome fear and taken a particular action, I did not find myself in a situation that I was fearful of; and those few times that I did have to face the fear, it was never as bad as I had initially thought.

We are afraid of getting hurt or of getting rejected, and the fear of that is something that we have do deal with all the time. Whether it is participating in a new extreme sport, like skydiving (which was totally awesome by the way), asking someone out on a date, calling a business prospect or a client, or saying ‘hi’ to a stranger, we have to deal with fear pretty much every single time.

One of the ways to overcome fear is to understand that it will never be as bad as you fear it will. People are rarely as nasty or as mean as you worry they are, and extreme sports have a lot of safety equipment to make ensure that you don’t get hurt.

Another way to overcome fear is to act as if you cannot fail. ‘What would you do if you knew you could not fail?’ is a great question to ask yourself.

Finally, you can look at a situation from the stand point that you have nothing to lose. For instance, if you are about to call a prospect and are nervous and fearful, try to think about it this way: if the prospect says ‘no’, you are in the same position as if you did not call them in the first place, but if they say ‘yes’, then you will have a new client. So you really have nothing to lose.

Until next time,

V

Tags: , ,
Posted in Psychology, Success, Taking Action | 3 Comments »

Similarities Between Religion And Neo-Spirituality

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Yesterday I mentioned that I find that there are many similarities between traditional religion and the neo-spirituality movement that I find much more appealing. I want to mention some of the similarities that I found. The similarities are not in the story itself, like who talked to whom and in what order, but rather in the message and the answer to my ’so what?’.

A little disclaimer though. I do not know very much about religious history. I am not familiar with all the rules. I have been to church only a handful of times, and even then, it was a pretty modern church with a modern message. So I am making this comparison based on my experience, not some ‘absolute truth’.

The first similarity is in the ‘higher power’. Religion calls it God. Neo-spirituality calls it Energy or Universe or Spirit or some other name. In either case, it is something that is responsible for the creation of the world, is eternal, cannot be created or destroyed, and permeates theinter-spaces of the universe. The big difference, though, is that religion tends to stay away from the idea that each and every one of us is a co-creator, whileneo-spirituality truly promotes the idea that we are the co-creators of the universe.

Another similarity is gratitude. I have seen many religiously inclined people say grace before a meal. Neo-spirituality teaches that gratitude is one of the most empowering emotions one can experience and that being grateful is a very important part of our co-creating process.

The other similarity is prayer. Religion teaches us the importance of prayer, though it hardly teaches us how to pray properly. Neo-spirituality teaches us the powerful process of visualization. Both are done with the purpose of helping you get what you want.

These are the three big similarities that I have noticed about some pretty big, fundamental concepts. The story in the Bible, to me, is a metaphor to help us with the understanding of the message, rather than an accurate description of events (hopefully I won’t be torched by religious fanatics for this). But like I said, my knowledge of religion is pretty limited, so feel free to correct me through the comments.

Fundamentally, I think, the purpose of religion and neo-spirituality is to become a better, more prosperous person.

Until next time,

V

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Energy, Neo-Spirituality, Universe | No Comments »

Knowledge vs Action

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

I couple of weeks ago I heard about the ‘Centre For Spiritual Living’ and decided to check it out. I was afraid that it was going to be a church wearing a mask of spirituality, but I was pleased that it wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few similarities between this Centre and a church, but that is like the similarities between science and religion. The message was not a typical religious message, and that was very pleasant to the ears. They said that, “we are not a church, we are a centre; and this is not a religion, it’s a philosophy”.

Last week Dr. Kenn Gordon was speaking about knowledge and application. This is something i heard from almost everyone I have ever come across in self development programs and books, everyone from Tony Robbins to Bob Proctor.

Knowledge is potential power. It is what you do with it, the application of knowledge in other words, that brings you power. Just knowing something is not very useful, it seems. Bob Proctor, in his Born Rich program, was saying that you can memorize the entire program and still have no improvement in your life unless you apply your knowledge. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Having a lot of facts, figures, and ideas stored in your head does not give you much besides the satisfaction of knowing.

The power, and the results that follow, come from actually taking action based on those facts, figures, and ideas. Your power and your results come from putting one foot in front of the other, time and time again, and from the never-ending drive to go forward. So, if you have been sitting around with a lot of knowledge in your head and are talking virtually no action, it is time for a little change. Set a goal and do something RIGHT NOW to move yourself closer to the goal. It may be a phone call…it may be finding a book…it may be searching the web. Whatever it is, go and do it NOW!

Now, back to the Centre For Spiritual Living. I was also pleased to learn that there are “Science of Mind” classes offered through the Centre. I have gone to the introductory class, but we did not do much else but introductions. Next week we are diving into a pretty thick book, The Science Of Mind, by Ernest Holmes, so it should be interesting!

Until next time,

V

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Success, Taking Action | No Comments »

Resonance

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Since for a few days I wrote about the energy, waves, and frequencies, I thought I should talk a little bit about resonance. In my mind this is the explanation, at least a partial explanation, for the Law of Attraction.

In the physics class I learned that objects and systems have certain frequencies, called resonance frequencies, at which they tend to oscillate at much larger amplitudes. Examples of that include a vocalist shattering glass and this bridge in Tacoma. An object ‘coming in contact’ with a wave with the frequency equivalent to its own resonance frequency will move significantly more than usual.

I want to relate that to our results. If everything is energy, then our results are energy as well, and our results have a frequency associated to them. Our thoughts, feelings, and actions need to be ‘in resonance’ with the results that we are after, with the feelings being most important  – in the movie, The Secret, they talk about how you need to be in the proper state to receive the response from the Universe.

This is not to say that the BMW that we are after is going to violently shake its way to your garage, though that would be pretty funny. But I do believe that we need to put our bodies in a certain state of vibration in order to achieve the things that we after. And I will go out on a limb here, and say that if we could measure these frequencies, the frequency of vibration of our bodies will match one of the resonance frequencies of our results.

Does that make sense? Your thoughts?

Until next time,

V

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Energy, Success, Universe | 2 Comments »

Why The Universe Understand Feelings

Monday, October 5th, 2009

I spent some time this weekend thinking about why is it that the Universe ‘understands’ our feelings and not our words?

I mean, if we are to follow more traditional religious teachings, then God is an ‘all-knowing’ Being who understand everyone! I don’t know about you, but in my mind this brings up an image of some Being who understands every language. What if, it’s not that this Being understands every language, but that It understands everyone because everyone speaks a universal language – a language of feelings?

Now, before we go any further, I want to say that I am not religious (I am spiritual but not religious). In fact, it feels strange using the word ‘God’ in my posts. But I will admit that the concepts are very similar, if not outright the same – it’s only the terminology that changes. When I say ‘God’, I really mean ‘the Universe’, and I only use ‘God’ so that, potentially, more people understand what I am trying to say.

The more I thought about it, the more I was convincing myself that the feelings do give us a universal language. I want to say that every person feels the same ‘types’ of feelings and those feelings ‘feel’ the same inside their bodies. Sure, we may give the same feeling a different name, but the vibration that the feeling generates is the same.

And since the Universe is based on energy and vibration, It can ‘understand’ vibration. Last week I wrote about how the Universe provides us with a platform on which we can create and execute our own programs for our life, how it is the programming language. And your feelings are part of the program that you write. Everyone has feelings and feelings are vibrational – this is why I think that the Universe can understand them. I know it’s not very scientific, so I am open to your ideas.

What do you think?

Until next time,

V

Tags: , ,
Posted in Energy, Universe | No Comments »

What Does The Universe And Programming Have In Common

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

I like to think of the Universe not as an all-knowing, all-seeing intelligent being, but rather as a medium or a mechanism that has certain rules and principles that allows for physical things to exist. I relate it to a programming language, which is nothing more than an environment in which you, or anyone else, can write a program to do something useful. To write that program you have to know the rules of the programing language, otherwise you will end up with random ‘code’ that will not work.

But think about it, the programming language is not intelligent. It ‘knows’ how to do a lot of things and has many built in functions, but it is a platform on which you can build something useful. So I am simply trying to learn the rules of the Universe and attempt to play by them.

So here is the big analogy, the programming language is the Universe, the programmer is you, the program that you are writing are your thoughts and actions, and the output of your program are your results in life. If you know the rules of the programming language, you can write a program to do exactly what you want. It is very similar with the Universe – once you know the rules, you can do things in a way that will get you the results that you are looking for. But like in programming, even if you know the language and write your code with a lot of focus and dedication, you will need to do some debugging. So be prepared to do some debugging…

Until Monday,

V

Tags:
Posted in Universe | 2 Comments »

How To Communicate With The Universe

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

You may wonder how to effectively talk to the Universe and apply the Law of Attraction. And if you have been exposed to religion, you probably have an inaccurate idea of how to do this.

What does religion teach us about getting what you want. Well, ignoring the many religious institutions that preach living in poverty and that it is sinful to want something, we are told that prayer is your communication channel with God. While this is true, it is only a small part of the entire picture, and you need to see the entire picture to communicate effectively.

The Universe, or God if you come from a more formal religious background, does not understand words – it has no clue what you are saying. What It does understand are feelings, and there lies the key to your effective communication, as you do not even need to talk – all you have to do is genuinely feel good.

Why do I say that? As I talked about before, everything in this world is energy and everything vibrates at a certain rate. Every time you have a feeling, it is accompanied by a certain frequency of vibration, which you send out to the Universe. The Universe, in turn, responds to your frequency of vibration in like kind via the Law of Attraction.

Although this may sound like a strange question at first, I want you to stick with me – have you noticed that different feelings physically feel differently in your body? In other words, have you noticed that your body reacts differently to feelings of joy as opposed to feelings of anger? That is the vibratory rate of the given feeling that is interacting with the vibratory rate of your body as it goes out with a message to the Universe.

Prayer works as long as you pray properly, which most people do not. Instead of praying for what they want, most people pray about something that they do not want, while generating the feelings associated with that since they are focused on what they don’t want. And even when people pray for what they want, they more often than not, hope for the desired outcome, whenever God decides to respond, instead of expecting the desired outcome. The two out a very different message to the Universe, which is something I will talk about tomorrow.

Until next time,

V

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Energy, Universe | 1 Comment »

Newer Entries »