E-Squared: Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality (22 page)

Colonel Mustard, in the Conservatory,
with the Wrench

“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
, G
ERMAN THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

I was playing the board game
Clue
with a couple of my daughter’s friends. We passed out the detective notebooks and placed the rope, the lead pipe, and the other miniature weapons in the miniature mansion’s miniature rooms.

I said to Kylie, who was playing Professor Plum, “Why don’t you go first?”

The girls looked at me as if I’d just asked them to take a shower in the boys’ locker room.

“Mom!”

“Miss Grout!”
they loudly protested.

“What? What did I say?”

“Everybody knows Miss Scarlet always goes first.”

Likewise, they explained that in order to make an accusation, you have to be in the room where you think the murder took place, and if you want to take a secret passageway, you can only do it between the parlor and the kitchen or the library and the conservatory.

“Who says?” I asked.

“The rules. It says so right here.” One of them thrust the neatly printed rule sheet in my face.

These “engraved-in-stone rules” remind me of how we
“play life.”
Somebody decided that this is how the world “works,” and because we all agreed to see it that way, we made it “reality.”

Turns out, we’ve all been had. Nearly all the concepts and judgments we take for granted are gross distortions of things as they really are. Everything we think is “real” is simply a reflection of the “
Clue
rules” we all agreed upon. The world we think we see is merely the projection of our own individual “
Clue
rules.”

Maybe it’s time to take those
Clue
rules, cut them up, and use them as confetti. Until we do, until we finally get it that we are “wholly loved, wholly lovable, and wholly loving,” we will continue to feel empty, question our purpose, and wonder why we’re here.

That’s why we need to ask for a whole new lens for looking at the world.

Anecdotal Evidence

“Being gloomy is easier than being cheerful. Anybody can say ‘I’ve got cancer’ and get a rise out of a crowd. But how many of us can do five minutes of good stand-up comedy?”

—P.J. O’R
OURKE, FORMER
R
OLLING
S
TONE
CORRESPONDENT

Caryn Johnson always knew she wanted to be an actor. In fact, she says her first coherent thought as a young child was,
Man, I’d love to act
.

Even though she grew up in the New York projects, theater and what she called “pretending to be somebody else” was a big part of her life. This was back in the days when Joe Papp brought free Shakespeare to her neighborhood in Chelsea. She also watched lots of movies with her brother, Clyde, and her mom, Emma, who raised the two kids on a single salary.

“When I saw Carole Lombard coming down some stairs in a long satin thing, I thought, I can do that,” she says. “I wanted to come down those stairs and say those words and live that life. You could be anything, up there in the movies. You could fly. You could meet alien life-forms. You could be a queen. You could sleep in a great big bed, with satin sheets, in your own room.”

By the time she was eight, she was acting for the Hudson Guild Community Center, a children’s day care/theater/arts program near her neighborhood.

Her life took a detour in high school when her dyslexia caused her to get mistakenly classified as “slow, possibly retarded.” She dropped out of school, became a junkie, and forgot all about her acting dream. By the time she was 19, she was a single mom herself.

The good news is she
did
kick the drugs. In fact, her daughter’s father was the drug counselor who helped her get off the junk. But the bad news is, he wasn’t cut out to be a father. He left a few months after their daughter Alexandrea was born.

Caryn was a high school dropout with no skills. In fact, the only thing she knew how to do was take care of kids. She took a job as a nanny and moved to Lubbock, Texas, with the friend who hired her. Eventually, the friend moved to San Diego, and Caryn and her daughter gladly followed.

When the relationship went south, she found herself stuck in California with no money and no skills. She didn’t even know how to drive, a major hindrance in freeway-happy California.

“I had no high school diploma,” she says. “All I had was me and my kid.”

Oh yeah, and that
Man, I’d love to act
dream. During the day, she learned to lay bricks and went to cosmetology school. At night, she played around with an experimental theater troupe. For a while she did hair and makeup for a funeral home, supplementing her income with a welfare check, “worrying about how to get my kid more than one pair of shoes, or how to make $165 worth of groceries last for a month.”

Through it all, she continued to believe that “anything is possible.” She continued to believe that she could be like Carole Lombard, floating down the stairs in satin.

“Acting is the one thing I always knew I could do,” she says.

Her unwavering belief finally unlocked the door. In 1983, famed Hollywood director Mike Nichols happened to catch her performance in an experimental troupe in Berkeley, the Black Street Hawkeyes. He was so blown away by the characters she played that he signed her immediately for a one-woman performance,
The Spook Show,
on Broadway. Steven Spielberg caught that show and cast her as Celie in
The Color Purple
. By then, she’d changed her name to Whoopi Goldberg.

“I can do anything. I can be anything. No one ever told me I couldn’t. No one ever expressed this idea that I was limited to any one thing, and so I think in terms of what’s possible, not impossible,” Whoopi said in her autobiography,
Book
.

“I knew I could never turn water into wine or make cats speak French. But I also learned that if you come to a thing with no preconceived notions of what that thing is, the whole world can be your canvas.

“Just dream it and you can make it so. I believe I belong wherever I want to be, in whatever situation or context I place myself. I believed a little girl could rise from a single-parent household in the Manhattan projects, start a single-parent household of her own, struggle though seven years of welfare and odd jobs and still wind up making movies.

“So, yeah, I think anything is possible. I know it because I have lived it. I know it because I have seen it. I have witnessed things that ancients have called miracles, but they are not miracles. They are the products of someone’s dream. As human beings, we are capable of creating a paradise, and making each other’s lives better by our own hands. Yes, yes, yes—this is possible.

“If something hasn’t happened, it’s not because it can’t happen, or won’t: it just hasn’t happened yet.”

More Anecdotal Evidence

“Harnessing the power of your mind can be more effective than the drugs you have been programmed to believe you need.”

—B
RUCE
L
IPTON
, P
H
.D., A
MERICAN CELL BIOLOGIST

For years, Myrtle Fillmore’s life revolved around her cabinet full of medicine. Not only did the eventual co-founder of Unity Church suffer from tuberculosis, which caused her to spit up blood and run a near-constant fever, but she also had aggravated malaria. One day, she attended a lecture by New Thought teacher Dr. E. B. Weeks, who made the outrageous claim that God, who was all-good, would never wish disease on anyone. Furthermore, he said, if she aligned herself with this all-good spirit, she would discover her true self—which could only be healthy.

Over and over, Myrtle began affirming, “I am a child of God and therefore do not inherit sickness.” She refused to “judge according to appearance” and praised the vital energy of God within every cell of her body. Little by little, Myrtle began to get better. Within two years, there was no sign of her old illnesses.

Myrtle’s husband, Charles, witnessed the remarkable healing of his wife and decided to try the same affirmations. He, too, was considered disabled. Thanks to a boyhood skating accident and a subsequent series of operations, his hip socket was badly damaged and one of his legs had stopped growing. He wore a steel extension to make his legs even. He figured the best he could do was learn to live with the chronic pain.

Like Myrtle, Charles Fillmore began to affirm that there is an all-good, all-powerful energy force. Not only was he completely cured of pain within a year, but his shortened leg caught up with the other one. The universe took care of him.

The Method

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN
, G
ERMAN THEORETICAL PHYSICIST

This experiment will prove what Sally Field finally figured out when she won the Oscar for
Places in the Heart:
“You like me, you really like me.” It will prove how sublime our world truly is.

For the next 48 hours, we’re going to keep track of goodness and beauty.

The record of history, of course, is written in blood—in wars, treachery, and competition. But as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould said, “The fossil record shows long, uninterrupted periods of biological stability.”

In fact, it’s a structural paradox that one violent act so distracts us from the 10,000 acts of kindness. Human courtesy, kindness, and beauty, he claimed, are the norm.

He called it our duty, our holy responsibility, to record and honor the victorious weight of all the innumerable little kindnesses that are all too often unnoted and invisible.

Keep a journal on hand for the next two days, and list these kindnesses. Here are some examples of what you might enumerate: