E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality (13 page)

Don’t we have anything better to think about?

If the seven million readers of
Ladies’ Home Journal
would all wonder instead,
What can I do to improve my own soul?
or
How could I make the world more loving?
the big problems we’re so afraid of would be solved in a year. Seven million people concentrating on issues like that are an unstoppable force!

2.
The adman’s copy.
U.S. advertisers spend more than $400 billion every year trying to convince you that without their products, you are a complete and total loser. The ad shill’s entire reason for being is to make you and me dissatisfied with what we have and who we are. The average American sees between 1,500 and 3,000 commercials per day. Even non-TV watchers are constantly being invited to “consume.” Everything from ATM monitors to dry-cleaning bags to stickers on supermarket fruit has been known to feature ads.

The most dangerous ads, as far as I’m concerned, are the new prescription drug ads, because they teach people to be sick. Madison Avenue has done a stellar job training us to need deodorant, mouthwash, and Domino’s two-for-one pizzas. Now, they’re breaking new ground by training us to be sick. Steven Pressfield, best-selling author of
The Legend of Bagger Vance
and other books, says his former ad-agency boss instructed him to “invent a disease” because “then we can sell the hell out of its cure.”

3.
Other people’s heads.
Like radio waves that fly around in the atmosphere, other people’s thoughts constantly bombard you. You unconsciously pick up the thoughts of your family, your culture, and your religion, even if you don’t actively practice it.

I once met a guy who had invented dozens of products, including many that you and I use on a daily basis. He was regularly dubbed a “genius.” But if you gave him the “No Child Left Behind” test, he’d have been sent back to first grade. The guy never learned to read. And he said that was intentional.

“If I had learned to read,” he said, “I’d pick up other people’s ideas and cement those in my head. I choose not to bother with the interference.”

This is probably the place where I should mention I’m not advocating illiteracy, just making a point that the less interference from a crazy, thought-filled world, the better your access to the FP. In fact, the reason all the spiritual
bigwigs
meditate is because it helps them avoid the interference.

4.
Your own head.
Despite what you may think you’re thinking, it’s quite likely there’s an even bigger thought getting in the way. Unfortunately, all of us have an underlying sound track that goes something like this:

There’s something wrong with me
.

I’m not good enough.

I have no talent.

I don’t deserve it
.

I can’t do it
.

It’s too hard.

Sweeping negative statements like these are what we call false prayers, the default beliefs to which you march in obedience. The good news is they’re not true. The bad news is they operate
as if
they were true. They’re your own personal amulet that you unwittingly carry everywhere you go. You wouldn’t dream of plowing through life without them because, well, they’re just so … familiar.

When I first began writing for magazines, I had an inferiority complex that wouldn’t have fit in Shea Stadium. Because I was from a small town in the Midwest, I couldn’t imagine I had anything to say to a fancy editor from New York. Although I sent query after query pitching my ideas, I didn’t really expect to sell too many. After all, I just “knew” there weren’t enough assignments to go around. At best, I figured I might be able to sneak a few under the radar.

Needless to say, I got a lot of rejection letters, so many that I probably could have wallpapered the city of Cincinnati, should it have needed wallpaper. The editors didn’t exactly tell me to drop dead, but they didn’t encourage me to keep writing, either.

Then I read a book called
Write for Your Life,
by Lawrence Block. In the early ‘80s, when Block’s column for
Writer’s Digest
was at the height of its popularity, he and his wife, Lynn, decided to throw a series of seminars for writer wannabes.

Unlike most writing seminars where you learn to write plot treatments or compose strategies to get an agent, Block’s seminar dealt with the only thing that really matters when it comes to being a writer: getting out of your own way, and getting rid of the countless negative thoughts that tell you what a hopelessly uninteresting specimen of humanity you are.

At the seminar, participants meditated, grabbed partners, and confessed their greatest fears. They did all kinds of things that helped them get to the bottom of why they wanted to write, but didn’t.

The seminars were hugely successful, but Block, who was a writer, not a seminar-giver, eventually got tired of trotting around the country staging events. Instead, he self-published the book I came across about the same time.

I took the book to heart. I did all of the exercises. I wrote affirmations. I consulted my inner child to find out what I was so afraid of. I even sent myself postcards for 30 days straight. On these postcards, I’d write such affirming reminders as:

   “You, Pam, are a great writer.”

   “You, Pam, have what it takes to sell to New York editors”

   “You, Pam, are interesting and people want to hear what you have to say.”

I’m sure the mail carrier thought I was a little cracked, wasting 25 cents (or whatever the postage was back then) to send myself postcards telling me how fascinating and abundant I was. But if he knew what a change it made in my life, he’d have been doing it, too.

Suddenly, I started getting assignments from prominent magazines—with, yes, the big New York editors. First, there was
Modern Bride,
which wanted a piece on exercises that couples could do together.
Ladies’ Home Journal
asked for a travel story on Tampa Bay. Suddenly, this once-insecure writer from Kansas was getting assignments from big national magazines, the kind you see in dentists’ offices.

Did I suddenly start writing more fluidly, coming up with more compelling ideas? Probably a little bit (after all, that was one of my affirmations), but mostly I changed the reality of what I thought and said about myself.

I gave up the thought there weren’t enough assignments to go around. I let go of the ridiculous notion I wasn’t talented enough to sell to national magazines.

Quacking in Unison

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

—T-
SHIRT SEEN IN HAWAII

Filmmaker Michael Moore, in a commencement speech, gave the following advice: “All you boys should learn that once you give up on that girl, she will come to you.”

In some ways, our intentions work the same way. By believing we desperately need a miracle or something we don’t have now, we deny Truth. We suit up with the wrong attitude.

Anytime we look for an answer, we make the false assumption that the answer isn’t already here. Intending love or happiness or some other desired goal defeats the whole purpose. It assumes that the outcome of life is still in doubt. It’s not.

Praying is not a matter of bribing God. It’s simply understanding the higher laws that override the lower law of the physical plane. To plead or beg or to act like it’s not here is to suppose duality, not unity. And unity is what we’re aiming for. You have to live under the assumption that your intention has already happened. You have to feel as if it has already come to pass—to get those ducks lined up … to get all those waves in laser-like coherence.

I don’t know if you know anything about laser technology, but it works a little bit like Congress did on September 12, 2001. Remember how all those cantankerous old senators and representatives completely forgot they were Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives? How the only thing in their minds was
I’m an American, by God,
and they sang “God Bless America” in one great, big unified chorus? Well, that’s how a laser works.

Unlike ordinary light, which has lots of different types and sizes of wavelengths, lasers have wavelengths of only one size, which lends them pinpoint precision.

This is how you want to make your intentions. Or it is if you want to see something appreciable happen. Jesus didn’t doubt for one second there was plenty of food to go around.

In fact, one of the reasons Jesus was crucified was that those in command thought he was altogether too confident. How dare he be so bold as to think he could make crippled people walk, lepers dance? But Jesus didn’t just
think
he could do these things. He knew. He knew the truth of who he was, which made his mind a veritable laser. He didn’t stop to question if a blind man could see (after all, the gift of health and perfect self-expression is everyone’s divine right) or if water could become wine. He knew he had the right to command the heavens and the earth. In fact, that’s the only big difference between Jesus and you and me. We’re still wondering.

If you go back to Aramaic—which as you probably know, is the language in which Jesus conversed—the root word of
ask
reveals more than a “well, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Ask,
in Aramaic, means a combination of “claim” (as in, that deed to the land is yours) and “demand.” To ask for something in prayer is to simply lay hold of what’s yours. You have the right, and even the responsibility to command your life.

How can we be sure?
you ask. Same way you’re sure that two plus two equals four. Because it’s a simple, unalterable principle of mathematics. If you add two plus two and get five, that’s not the fault of mathematics. Likewise, if you’re not getting the answers you want, that’s not the field of potentiality’s fault. It’s you that’s screwing up the principle.

Intentions that are focused through an integrated, whole personality are like a laser—a single, clear beam.

Anecdotal Evidence

“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”

—B
ENAZIR
B
HUTTO, FORMER PRIME MINISTER OF
P
AKISTAN

When he was 34, Augusten Burroughs decided to stop being an alcoholic and become a
New York Times
best-selling author. As he says in his memoir
Magical Thinking,
“The gap between active alcoholic copywriter living in squalor and literary sensation with a scrapbook of rave reviews seemed large. A virtual canyon. Yet one day, I decided that’s exactly what I would do.”

Fourteen days later, he finished his first manuscript, a novel called
Sellevision
.

“I did not expect it to be a bestseller. It was the cheese popcorn book. What I did expect was that it would be published,” he says.

And then he wrote a memoir about his childhood.

“And this, I decided, needed to be a
New York Times
bestseller, high on the list. It needed to be translated into a dozen languages and optioned for film,” he writes.

His agent suggested he tone down his ambitions.

“I understood his point of view,” Augusten explains. “I also understood that the book would be huge, not because it was exceptionally well written … [but] because it had to be a bestseller, so I could quit my loathsome advertising job and write full time.”