E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality (17 page)

No one had ever had that kind of faith before. All Schneider had ever heard before this was, “you poor, poor blind thing.”

Meir Schneider’s family, like any good, sympathetic family, discouraged him from getting his hopes up. “Sure, try the exercises,” they said, “but don’t forget—you’re a blind kid.” Within a year, as Isaac predicted, Meir began to see—not a lot at first, but enough to believe that maybe this 16-year-old kid knew more than the doctors who wrote him off as blind and inoperable.

Eventually Schneider gained enough vision to read, walk, run, and even drive. Today, he proudly possesses a California driver’s license, and he operates a self-healing center.

“Blind people,” he says, “become more blind because they aren’t expected to see. They’re thrown into a category.”

Furthermore, he can’t understand why an optimistic concept sounds so bizarre to most people.

When Barbra Streisand was a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, she fell in love with the movies. She wanted nothing more than to be a glamorous movie star. Unfortunately, her widowed mother was dirt-poor, and Barbra wasn’t exactly Grace Kelly material. Any reasonable career counselor would have encouraged her to pursue a different goal. “After all, honey, you have an unconventional nose and … well, how can I put this politely? You being an actress is like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wanting to be a jockey.”

But Barbra’s intentions were
so
strong that I believe she manipulated circumstances through the only pathway she could—by manifesting a voice so powerful that it led to stardom on Broadway and eventually to the movies.

Roll your eyes and call me deluded, but here are the facts: no one else in Barbra’s family could sing. No one else had any musical talent.

Matter Does Not Control You—You Control Matter

“We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.”

—W. H. A
UDEN
, A
NGLO
-A
MERICAN POET

When Terry McBride was 22, he ruptured a disk in his back while working construction. After a year of visiting a chiropractor and trying osteopathy and muscle relaxers, he decided to take the suggestion of an orthopedic surgeon who thought he should have his spine fused.

“I was told I’d be in the hospital for a couple weeks, home for a couple of weeks, in a brace for six months, and then as good as new,” McBride explained at a talk I once heard him give.

Two days after the surgery, he came down with a dangerously high fever. He was rushed back to the hospital where doctors discovered that somehow during the surgery he had contracted the
E. coli
bacteria. During the next year, he had eight surgical procedures to try to get rid of the spreading infection. By the fifth surgery, he was transferred to the teaching hospital at University of Washington, where, as he notes, “I was a celebrity. I had the worst case of osteomyelitis they’d ever seen.”

On the night before yet another surgery, his team of doctors walked somberly into his room. They’d finally gotten accurate x-rays, which showed the infection was no longer just in his spine. It had spread to his pelvis and abdomen, and down both legs. To get rid of it, they said, they were going to have to cut him open from end to end. They said that by doing this procedure, they could virtually guarantee they’d get rid of the infection. But they could also guarantee that he’d lose the use of his right leg.

“Now, I’d studied under one of the great metaphysicians—John Wayne—and when someone in the movies told the Duke they had to remove his leg, he said, ‘That’s okay, do it anyway,’” McBride points out. But then the doctor went on to say that if the infection were as bad as they all thought, he could also lose his
left
foot and control of his bowels and bladder, and there was a good chance he’d end up sexually impotent.

“Quite honestly,” McBride says, “that’s where they made their mistake.

“Now I don’t know about you, but I showed up on this planet as a happy little boy who liked myself. But it didn’t take long to learn that the people in authority knew more about me than I did. I learned that I needed to pay attention and that it was the teachers who were going to tell me how good I was in school. The coaches were gonna decide if I had any athletic ability. I learned early on to look outside myself for who I was.

“Now, I probably would have given them a leg,” McBride continues. “But when those doctors started insisting that there was no possible way to come out of this surgery whole, I decided right then and there that nobody was going to tell me who I was. I decided that very night that no longer was anyone with a fancy name badge going to determine my destiny.”

It was the night that changed his life. McBride, who had been studying spiritual principles, announced to the whole room (the team of five doctors, his wife, and his two-year-old daughter) that there was a power in the universe and he was going to use it to make him whole and free.

When he had first started saying such things, everybody had remarked, “Right on! Hold fast to your dreams.” But after ten surgeries, people began urging him to “face reality,” to quit focusing on his petty, ego-centered personal priorities.

“We’re talking petty, ego-centered personal priorities such as having a body that was disease free, a back that was strong enough to pick up my daughter, petty, ego-centered priorities like going to the bathroom without a plastic bag,” he says. “Some people started suggesting that maybe perfect health wasn’t part of God’s plan.”

“Even as a good fundamentalist, I couldn’t buy that I deserved eighteen surgeries. Maybe I’d sinned enough for four or five, but not eighteen,” McBride explains.

He was sent to talk to the hospital psychiatrist who sat him down and said, “Son, it’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses. Now you think that to be a man, you’ve got to be able to stand on two legs, to fight in the war like your father did, but it’s time to come work with me, to learn to accept that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

He showed him his medical records, which clearly stated: “Terry McBride’s problems are not curable. He will have permanent disability and ongoing surgeries for the rest of his life.”

“But I’m not my medical records,” McBride insisted. “I’m not my past. There is a power in me. I live in a spiritual universe and spiritual law can set me free.”

“Don’t you think your body would have healed by now if it was going to be healed?” the psychiatrist asked.

But McBride refused to give up. He went on to have 30 major surgeries over the course of 11 years, and wore a colostomy bag. All the while he continued to affirm that health and wholeness was his spiritual destiny.

Finally, long after most of us would have given up, he walked out of the hospital a free and whole strapping young man. Today, he travels the country speaking about his journey, teaching people the truth about their divine magnificence.

As he says, “We are already free. The infinite power of God will back up our belief in sickness and want if that’s what we choose. But we can also change our beliefs to health, love, joy, and peace. It’s time to claim our oneness with God, to step boldly into our lives. You are God and this is the truth that will set you free.”

The Method

“There are no limitations to the self except those you believe in.”

—S
ETH, DISEMBODIED TEACHER CHANNELED BY
J
ANE
R
OBERTS

Since we don’t have access to all of Masaru Emoto’s microscopes and research assistants, we’re going to affect matter by duplicating an experiment you might have tried back in grade school—namely, sprouting green-bean seeds. Dr. Larry Dossey, in more than a half dozen books on prayer, has detailed fastidiously precise medical studies that have proven that intention on a particular physical outcome affects everything from rye seeds to women with breast cancer. Again, we’re beginners, so we’re going to start with green beans.

Equipment:

   Cardboard egg carton

   Potting soil

   Green-bean seeds

Instructions: Plant two beans in each of the 12 slots of the egg carton, and place it near a window. Water the plants every couple of days. Make the following conscious intention:
With my innate energy, I will that the beans on the left side of the egg carton grow faster than the beans on the right.

Write down your observations for the next seven days.
Voilà—
by the end of the week, you should see evidence that your intention has manifested.

In the meantime, you can experiment with something scientists call
applied kinesiology.
It may sound complicated, but it’s really just an elementary method of testing how your body reacts to negative and positive statements, spoken aloud. Dr. John Goodheart pioneered applied kinesiology in the ‘60s when he discovered that muscles instantly became weak when the body was exposed to harmful substances, and strong in the presence of anything therapeutic. In the next decade, Dr. John Diamond discovered that muscles also respond to emotional and intellectual stimuli.

Touch the thumb and middle finger of each hand to form two rings. Now link them together. Pull the linked fingers of the right hand tightly against the left hand, exerting just enough pressure so they hold. Get a feel for how that feels.

Now say your name aloud: “My name is ______.” At the same time, exert the same amount of pressure. Since I’m assuming you’re not telling a fib, this statement will probably show that your hand stays strong and steady.

Now say: “My name is Julia Roberts.” Even if you exert the same amount of pressure as before, the fingers should break apart.

Try several true and false statements until you get the calibration down. If the circle holds, it indicates a positive response; if the fingers of the right hand were able to break the connection of your left hand, the answer is “no way.”

Not only is this an effective tool for getting your body’s advice, but it’s also useful for testing how your body responds to differing statements such as the following:

   “I am a huge dorkball.”

   “I am loving, passionate, peaceful, and happy.”