E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality (21 page)

To make it more effective and to add a little fun, shower your target with good thoughts. Send them incomparable blessings. Think about them winning the lottery, getting a date with Channing Tatum, winning a trip around the world.

Lab Report Sheet

The Principle:
The 101 Dalmatians Principle

The Theory:
You are connected to everything and everyone else in the universe.

The Question:
Can I send a message to someone without being in that person’s presence?

The Hypothesis:
If during the next two days, I telepathically send a specific message to a specific person, I will get evidence that he or she received it.

Time Required:
48 hours

The Approach:
Okay, FP, I’m hearing the melody from
The Twilight Zone
playing in the background, but I’m willing to suspend judgment just this once to see if this might be one of those mysterious aspects of quantum physics. What say you?

Today’s Date:
__________
Time:
__________

Research Notes:
______________________________________

____________________________________________________

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

—R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE
, B
OHEMIAN
-A
USTRIAN POET

EXPERIMENT #9

THE FISH AND LOAVES
PRINCIPLE
The Universe Is Limitless, Abundant,
and Strangely Accommodating

“Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”

—R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE
, B
OHEMIAN
-A
USTRIAN POET

The Premise

This experiment will dispel the myth that life sucks and then you die. Most of us, whether we admit it or not, believe life is hard. We believe there’s only so much to go around—whether we’re talking money, time, or popcorn at the multiplex cinema. Even people with Maseratis in their garage spend way too much time figuring out how to get more.

Why? Because they mistakenly believe there’s not enough. Even billionaires, even people with an overabundance of resources, live under the oppressive spell of “there’s not enough.”

A friend of mine was interviewing the wealthy owner of a successful business whose company was launching a new product. Noticing the rabid dollar signs in his eyes, she asked him if there was a profit margin, a success index, a dollar amount of some kind that he would consider “enough.” The business owner stopped for a moment, sighed, and gave this reply: “Man, you just don’t get it. There is never enough.”

It’s like the game musical chairs. Everyone’s worried that when the music stops, they’ll be the one without a place to sit.

We’re rich beyond measure, but we feel strapped, scared, and always on guard. Sure, we call ourselves an abundant society, but in many ways it’s nothing but an illusion, a ruse, thanks to the ever-present “there’s not enough” mantra. We’re too busy playing musical chairs, running faster and faster around that illusory circle of shrinking chairs. Contrary to everything you know, the Fish and Loaves principle proposes that there is a natural law of abundance and that everything’s okay—you can relax.

When Jesus “prayed” to multiply the fish and loaves, he didn’t fret over how this might come about. He simply put all his thoughts into one laser-like formation—namely, that abundance and plenty were his divine right. Likewise, for the duration of this experiment, you’re going to set aside your normal thinking patterns and allow them to be superseded by the remote possibility that there might be enough. For everyone.

Something Is Wrong with This Picture

“If you think there’s a bogeyman, turn on the light.”

—D
OROTHY
T
HOMPSON
, A
MERICAN JOURNALIST AND BROADCASTER

Scarcity and lack is our default setting, the unquestioned conditioning that defines our lives. The belief that “there’s not enough” starts first thing every morning when the alarm clock rings: “Ah, shit, I didn’t get enough z’s.”

Before we even sit up, before we even squeeze our feet into our bunny slippers, we’re already bemoaning lack. When we finally do get up, it’s “Now I don’t have enough time to get ready.”

And from there it goes downhill.

We spend large chunks of our energy worrying and complaining about not getting enough. We don’t have enough time. We don’t get enough exercise or fiber or vitamin E. Our paychecks aren’t big enough. Our weekends aren’t long enough. We, poor things, are not thin enough, smart enough, or educated enough.

It never even occurs to us to examine whether this “not enough” mantra is true. It’s so profoundly ingrained that it shapes our deepest sense of who we are. Being deficient has become the lens through which we experience every facet of life.

It’s why we take jobs that don’t satisfy us. It’s why we stay in unfulfilling relationships. It’s why we keep going back to the buffet line long after our appetites have been filled. It’s why we’ve created systems and institutions to control access to resources (oil, anyone?) that we perceive as valuable and limited. If we weren’t so worried about not having enough, we could relax and use the resources we do have to develop alternative sources of energy, like the sun or the wind—energy, I hasten to point out, that will never run out.

This “not enough” fiction drives us to do things we’re not proud of, things that compromise our highest ideals, things that lay waste to the natural world, things that separate us from our highest selves. And once we define ourselves as deficient, all our energy gets sucked into making sure we’re not the one being left out, not the one losing ground to the “other guy.”

But here’s the deal. It’s all a big, fat, unfortunate lie. There is enough—for everyone. We live in a big, bounteous universe, and if we can just get over this unfounded fear of not enough, we can stop hoarding resources (c’mon, who really needs 89 pairs of shoes?) and free up our energy to make sure all of us get what we need.

The Chumash Native Americans, who lived for thousands of years on the central coast of California, enjoyed what I would call rich and prosperous lives. They lived in small, close-knit villages and used the natural resources around them to make canoes, arrows, and medicines. They regularly dined on more than 150 kinds of seafood, honeydew melons, and pine nuts. They made fur blankets, soapstone pots decorated with shells, and extraordinary baskets, so tightly woven they could hold water. Almost every day the Chumash played games, danced, sang lullabies to their children, and enjoyed a cleansing sweat in the village
’apa’yik.

Nowadays, we call that type of lifestyle “subsistence.” We look down upon it as a hardscrabble existence. But what I’d like to suggest is that the Chumash, unlike us, lived in an economy of abundance. To the Chumash, there was always enough. Not too much. Not too little. Enough. Most important, there was enough time for things that matter—relationships, delicious food, art, games, and rest.

Right now, with the resources already at your disposal (you don’t have to get a new job or find a new relationship or even start a time-consuming new yoga practice), you can begin to recognize and lead a rich and meaningful life. And the best part is, you can quit working so damned hard. Take it easy for a change.

“Bliss” Happens

“What if this powerful force was used to uplift people rather than keep them trapped in the corporate and religious food chain?”

—M
ARK
V
ICENTE, DIRECTOR OF
W
HAT THE
B
LEEP
D
O
W
E
K
NOW
!?

The bottom line is, we have no conception of the limits we have placed on our perception. If we really knew the extent to which we have denied the world’s loveliness, we would be shocked.

Our confusion is so profound that we cannot even conceive of the world without sacrifice. But here’s the thing: The world contains no sacrifice except what we laid upon it.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider just how deluded we’ve become.

A few days after Eckhart Tolle’s 29th birthday, he suffered an intense anxiety attack. He had suicidal thoughts. His life so far had basically sucked. On this particular night, he kept saying to himself, over and over again, “I cannot live with myself any longer.” Suddenly, he says, “I could feel myself being sucked into a void.”

When he “woke up,” all he could experience was love, a state of deep, uninterrupted peace and bliss.

His intense emotional pain forced his consciousness to withdraw from all the limits he had placed on it. The withdrawal was so complete that his deluded self, his unhappy and deeply fearful self, immediately collapsed like an inflatable toy with the plug removed.

He spent almost two years doing nothing but sitting on park benches in a state of intense joy.

Or consider Byron Katie. This California Realtor was in the middle of an ordinary life—two marriages, three kids, a successful career—when she went into a deep depression. She checked herself into a halfway house for women with eating disorders, not because she had an eating disorder but because it was the only facility her insurance company would cover. One night, while lying on the floor in the attic ("I felt too unworthy to sleep in a bed,” she says), she suddenly woke up without any of life’s normal preconceived notions of sacrifice.

“All the thoughts that had been troubling me, my whole world,
the
whole world, was gone. … Everything was unrecognizable. … Laughter welled up from the depths and just poured out. … [I] was intoxicated with joy,” she says in her book
A Thousand Names for Joy.

She went home and sat by the window, staring out in complete bliss for days on end.

“It was like freedom had woken up inside me,” she says.