E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality (15 page)

On the way home from work, she stopped for groceries. She walked up to the checkout line when she heard a voice: “Yoo-hoo, Darlene. What are you doing here?”

It wasn’t an ethereal voice from the deep like the reassuring voice that comforted me at 3 a.m. It was the voice of Mary Jenkins, board president, who was waiting in line ahead of Darlene.

The point is that guidance comes in all packages. For many years, just before he went to sleep Napoleon Hill, author of the classic
Think and Grow Rich,
would call an imaginary council meeting of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine, Thomas Edison, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Luther Burbank, Henry Ford, Napoléon, and Andrew Carnegie. As chairman of this imaginary cabinet, Hill was able to ask questions and get advice.

After some months of these nighttime proceedings, Hill was astounded that the appointees on his cabinet developed individual characteristics. Lincoln, for example, began arriving late, then walking around in solemn parade. Burbank and Paine often engaged in witty repartee.

“These experiences became so realistic that I became fearful of their consequences, and discontinued them,” Hill admitted in
Think and Grow Rich.

Like many people who receive unusual inner guidance, Hill was reluctant to admit to his nightly council meetings.

But he did say this: “While the members of my Cabinet may be purely fictional … they have led me into glorious paths of adventure, rekindled an appreciation of true greatness, encouraged creative endeavor, and emboldened the expression of honest thought.”

Inner guidance can come in any package you’re open enough to hear. Some of us need a big whack on the side of the head. Others are more like Gary Renard, author of
The Disappearance of the Universe,
who with his extremely open mind, got guidance from a pair of ascended masters who showed up one night while he was watching TV.

Michael Beckwith, before he became a powerful New Thought minister at the Agape International Spiritual Center near Los Angeles, saw a vision of a scroll unroll that read, “Michael Beckwith to speak at the Tacoma Church of Religious Science.” When the Tacoma pastor called, saying, “Hey, Michael, we’d like you to come speak at our church,” Michael said, “I know.”

We Put Our Inner Guidance on the No-Call List

“One of the main functions of formalized religions is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”

—C
ARL
J
UNG
, S
WISS PSYCHIATRIST

Unfortunately, most of us have restricted the guidance we’ll let in. We’ve decided that neon signs, telegrams, and sealed letters from God are okay, but everything else is, well, just a bit too frightening.

Hell, we’d be scared witless if a scroll unrolled in front of us or an ascended master stepped in front of the TV during an episode of
Mad Men.
Our neural pathways have said, “Uh-uh, not me, I’m not up for that.” If some angel showed up at the foot of our bed, we’d probably call the police.

It has to be challenging for our inner guidance. How would you feel if someone asked you a question and then turned his or her back, ignoring everything you said? We’re like five-year-olds with our fingers in our ears going “la-la-la-la-la.”

You wouldn’t just pick up your phone when it rings and start talking loudly. You’d say “Hello” and listen to the person on the other end of the line. Here we are accusing the higher force of not giving us clear guidance and we’re the ones with our damned phones off the hook.

When Neale Donald Walsch first sat down with a pen in his hand and some tough questions in his heart, he was shell-shocked when a voice he presumed to be God answered back, “Do you really want to know the answer? Or are you just ranting?” Walsch, who somewhat hesitantly agreed to play along, said, “Well, both. And if you’ve got answers, I’d love to hear them.”

Where did we ever pick up the foolhardy notion that inner guidance was restricted to a lucky few? A lot of it goes back to those myths we believe about God. That he’s oh-so mysterious and only on call on Sundays. The part that was left out is that our inner guidance is reliable and constantly available. It’s there anytime you choose to listen, same as CNN is on anytime you decide to switch on the TV. It’s that reliable.

And you are free to put it on the spot, to demand clear answers. Now.

Anecdotal Evidence

“No matter how much evidence you have, over time you tend to block out experiences that aren’t ‘normal.’”

—M
ARTHA
B
ECK
,
O
MAGAZINE COLUMNIST

Michael Beckwith, the guy I mentioned earlier who had a vision of a scroll, was looking up at a windmill one day. This is before he became a minister, when he wasn’t completely convinced that his decision to pursue a Godly calling was the right one. He said point-blank, “Look, God, if you’re listening, if this is what you really want for me, have that windmill point in my direction.”

Even though it was a windy day and the windmill was spinning very fast in the other direction, no sooner did he say that than the windmill stopped rotating on its normal axis and pointed straight at him.

Of course, he’d already had one or two mind-blowing experiences. To put himself through school (this is back when he wanted to be a doctor), Beckwith sold drugs—just to his friends, of course. Since he was a gregarious, open kind of guy, let’s just say his business flourished. His marijuana dealership grew to both coasts, and convinced him that if he played his cards right, he could retire completely by the age of 24.

But he knew something was off. His inner guidance kept prodding, giving him bizarre dreams, strongly suggesting there had to be a better way. He decided on his own to give up drugs, to follow that “better way.” He told all his friends that it was over: he was retiring. On his final drug deal (the one that would get rid of the last of his supplies), he was busted by federal agents. Now, keep in mind that not only did he have in his possession 100 pounds of pot, but he also had large sums of cash, guns, and hot cameras.

Still, his inner voice told him, “Everything is going to be okay.”

As he prepared for trial, his friends thought he was crazy. “Why aren’t you fretting, pacing the floor, thinking up strategies for getting out of this bad rap?” they asked him.

“I was guilty,” he says. “But I was also assured by God that everything was going to be okay.”

By that time, he’d seen a grander vision. He went to trial (his attorney was Robert Shapiro, pre-O.J. days, then just launching his career), peaceful and believing that no matter what, he was loved and cared for by this very real presence. Sure enough, he got off on a technicality, and when the judge freed him with the comment that he never wanted to see him again, Michael knew that he never would.

Sometimes, the field of infinite possibilities even manages to get through to people who scoff at it. In 1975 Gerald Jampolsky, at the time a successful California psychiatrist on the “outside,” was falling apart on the inside. His 20-year marriage had ended. He was drinking heavily. He developed chronic, disabling back pain. Of course, it never dawned on him to seek higher guidance.

As he says, “I was the last person to be interested in a thought system that used words like
God
and
love.
“

But nonetheless, when he first saw
A Course in Miracles,
the book I’ve mentioned a few times that teaches personal transformation by choosing love rather than fear, he heard a voice clearly tell him, “Physician, heal thyself. This is your way home.”

And of course, it was. Jampolsky has gone on to write many books. He lectures widely on the principles of
A Course in Miracles,
and he even started a center in Sausalito, California, for people with life-threatening illnesses.

Immediate, direct guidance is available 24/7. But instead of paying attention, we taught ourselves the most unnatural habit of not listening. It’s like the foreign-exchange student who didn’t grow up around technology and has no idea that the phone beside his bed could hook him up with that cute girl in his biology class. He thinks he has to wait until tomorrow to talk to her. It’s like that overlooked space heater I mentioned in the Preface.

More Anecdotal Evidence

“If only God would give me a clear sign. Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.”

—W
OODY
A
LLEN
,
A
MERICAN FILMMAKER

When she was 25, actress Jamie Lee Curtis was hanging out in her recently purchased Los Angeles apartment with her friend Debra Hill. Debra, who had produced
Halloween,
the spooky movie that launched Curtis’s career, had brought over the current issue of
Rolling Stone
magazine as a housewarming gift. They were flipping through the magazine and chatting optimistically about the end of Jamie Lee’s most recent relationship when they saw a photograph of three men.

Jamie Lee pointed to the man on the right, who was wearing a plaid shirt and a waggish smirk, and told Debra, “I’m going to marry that man.”

She’d never seen him before and had no idea who he was, but something inside told her he was “the one.”

“That’s Christopher Guest,” Debra said. “He’s in a funny new movie called
This Is Spinal Tap.
I know his agent.”

Jamie Lee, awestruck by this very clear churning in her gut, called the agent the next day, gave him her number, and told him to have Chris call her if he was interested.

He never called.

Several months later, while at Hugo’s, a popular West Hollywood restaurant, Jamie Lee glanced up to find herself staring straight at the guy from the magazine, who was only three tables away. He waved as if to say, “I’m the guy you called.” She waved back.

Hmm,
she thought.
Interesting.
Except a few minutes later, he got up to leave. He shrugged, waved, and walked out the door. Jamie Lee looked down at her plate, kicking herself for believing in something as stupid as “inner guidance.”

But the next day, her phone rang. It was Chris Guest and he wanted to set up a date. Four days later, at Chianti Ristorante on Melrose, they met for dinner. By the time Guest left for New York to tape an episode of
Saturday Night Live
just over one month later, they’d fallen deeply, passionately in love.

Soon after, when they were talking on the phone, Chris said to Jamie, “I was out walking along Fifth Avenue today.”

“Oh yeah,” Jamie said. “What’d you do there?”

“Ah, do you like diamonds?” he asked.

They were married on December 18, 1984, eight months after Jamie Lee Curtis got that initial guidance.

The Method

“Parting the Red Sea, and turning water to blood, the burning bush … nothing like that was going on now. Not even in New York City.”

—M
ICHAEL
C
RICHTON, AUTHOR OF
J
URASSIC
P
ARK

In this experiment, we’ll prove that the guidance received by Jamie Lee Curtis and others is not some weird,
Twilight Zone
-like anomaly, but a very real and ongoing tool that all of us can use at any time.

You’ll spend 48 hours expecting a specific, concrete answer to a specific, concrete question. It can be as simple as whether to adopt a new Siamese kitten or as complicated as whether or not to take a job offer. Either way, give your inner guidance 48 hours to spell it out. But watch out. I tried this once and got fired. In retrospect, however, it was the perfect answer, maybe the only one I could hear to the question I’d asked: “Is it time to launch my freelance writing career?”

Choose an issue that is troubling you, something that has a yes or no answer, something on which you’re really confused and don’t know what to do. I know you’re thinking of something right now, doesn’t matter what it is. That issue will work. Look at your watch.

Ask for a clear, non-debatable answer and ask for it to show up within the next 48 hours. It might show up immediately. It might take only a day, but within 48 hours, expect to have a neon sign of an answer.

It’s your job to set the intention and the time frame. The FP will do the rest.

Stan (remember the cute former surfer from Esalen I mentioned in the Preface?) had lost his job. To make matters worse, his girlfriend of three years decided it was time to move on. Needless to say, he had some pretty serious decisions to make. First on the agenda, Stan decided, was to find a way to make some money. But he had no idea what he wanted to do. I reminded him there was a divine plan for his life and that it would be revealed if he simply set the intention and a clear deadline.

Stan said something like this: “Hey, dude, if it’s true you have a plan for my life, I could use a directional pointer. I don’t have a lot of time, so by Friday morning, I want to know just what you have in mind for me.”

On Thursday afternoon, Stan was sitting in the hot springs with a man he’d never met. The man happened to mention he was opening a self-improvement center out in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands and was looking for someone to run the place. Stan immediately felt a buzz and, sure enough, less than 30 minutes later, he was offered the job, even though the sum total of his job experience at a self-improvement center was that of cabin cleaner.

Chalk one up for the FP!