The Only Thing That Matters (24 page)

R
ELIABLE
R
EPETITION

To explain: You can depend on Life to be repetitious. Very few events or situations arising in your life will be much of a surprise to you anymore. Not in the sense of your never having experienced anything like them before. How you are going to react, then, can actually be anticipated by you, and you can reject your prior decisions about such events or situations if you wish.

And
that
is Life's great secret. The greatest secret is not the Law of Attraction, but the
Law of Retraction
.

This is a tool used to
retract
old decisions and make new ones, instantly.
That is what true creation is all about
.

When you bear witness to your responses to Life's current events and immediately
retract
what you decided
in the past
about similar events, you give yourself almost unimaginable power—including the power to end struggle and suffering forever.

Buddha demonstrated this precisely, and taught it.

It is Gratitude that gives you this power. Gratitude gives you a Fresh Start. It is like being born again, and having the Mind reset to zero. (We'll discuss that in just a bit.) It wipes the slate clean of all prior negative judgments that you may have held about any person, event, circumstance, or situation.

At the risk of a little Repetition right here, let's review from a slightly different angle how the whole Process of Life works, so that you can see all of this even more clearly:

Within an astonishingly short period of time following your birth, you came into contact with—then analyzed, assembled, and stored—a monumental amount of data about your exterior world. You did this so efficiently that after only a few years on this planet, it became almost impossible for you to encounter any new experiences. New
events
, yes. New
experiences
, no.

This is by design
.

You are not
supposed
to encounter new experiences. You are supposed to encounter
the same experiences over and over again
.

The experiences you are encountering repeatedly are inside of you, not outside of you.
All
experience is interior. It is
events
that are exterior. But events have nothing to do with your experience. The proof of this is the fact that two people can have distinctly
different
experiences of
the exact same event
.

So we see that you can encounter any number of new exterior
events
, but one can have virtually no truly new
experiences.
And the older you become, the more this will be obvious to you. Indeed, this truth will evidence itself exponentially as each year goes by.

You have
already
experienced this.

You have already experienced love, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced animosity, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced commitment, and you will no doubt experience it again. You have already experienced betrayal, and you will no doubt experience it again.

You have already experienced disappointment and excitement, agony and ecstasy, frustration and exhilaration, exasperation and exaltation, anger and joy, agitation and peace, loss and gain, fear and fearlessness, cowardice and courage, ignorance and wisdom, blahs and bliss, confusion and clarity, and just about every other emotional polarity that one could describe or imagine.

The reason it was said that all experience is interior is that
emotion is the sponsor
of your experience, and all emotions are created within. Events are simply outer physical occurrences. It is the emotion you hold
about
a particular event that creates your experience of it. And there are no new emotions for you to experience at this stage of your life. There is an endless number of unique events which can and will be physically presented to you by Life, but the emotion generated by the event, and the interior experience that this emotion produces,
will be one which you have encountered before
. In most cases, many times before.

The Mind remembers its experiences. Every one of them.

Every.

Single.

One.

Of.

Them.

And now we see the reason for this.

Your Mind has been
designed
to hold in memory literally millions of experiences in order for you to notice that you are encountering conditions and events in your exterior world that are the same or nearly the same
in their emotional content
as you have encountered before.

The noticing of this is, in turn, intended to offer you repeated chances—literally
millions
of chances—to respond differently to conditions and events (both past and present) should you choose to, thereby
recreating yourself anew
in the next grandest version of the greatest vision ever you held about Who You Are.

We see, then, that a single Life offers in miniature what reincarnation offers in “maximature”: limitless opportunities to evolve.

This is the Process of Life in all its forms
.

Scientists tell us that even the Universe is evolving. Do you imagine that you are not?

28
Enlarging the Challenge—
Voluntarily

W
HAT HAS JUST BEEN SAID
is that, just when you have given what has been asked of you—just when you have reached Completion by expressing Divinity fully in one moment—
the Finish Line is moved
.

This is good news? This makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning, a smile on your face, a song in your heart, saying that you just can't wait to get into the day?

Well, actually, yes.

When you are clear about why you are here, where you are going, and how this process called “evolution”
works
… then, actually, yes, it
is
good news. Because you remember how incredibly …
incredible …
you felt when you reached that point of Completion in the previous stages of your growth.

You remember the warmth, the bliss, the wonderment and excitement, the quiet elation and gentle, inner satisfaction that washed over you in that moment when you expressed, fully, the love, the understanding, the wisdom and clarity, the compassion and caring, and each of the other Aspects of Divinity (one at a time, or all at once) being placed by you into the life of another and of all others whose lives you touch at the highest level.

You remember that feeling, and
that is a feeling you want again.
That is
an experience you wish to repeat
.

That is the Sense of Your Self that you
have always known is You.
It is Who You Are and How You Are when you are at your very, very best—and you want
more
of that.

Life's answer to your wanting more of that is the glory, the wonder, and the joy of Reliable Repetition.

Repeating an experience over and over again
in the same way
is not what is meant by the word “more” in this context. You don't merely want “more of the same,” you want a
greater degree
of what you experienced before.

Think of it this way: When you were small, the toddlers' rides at the amusement part were fun for sure, and the kids' roller coaster brought you thrills galore—until it didn't anymore. Sooner or later you wanted to try the Big Dipper.

And imagine this: you got on it
voluntarily
.

You watched the others screaming while they were on it. You felt the nervousness in your own stomach as you approached the ticket booth. Yet you bought your ticket anyway, and
you got on it voluntarily
.

Now that's an analogy, but it's not so very far from what's going on in your life. For
it is the nature of Life to seek greater and greater expressions and experiences of Itself
.

Still, it really
is
time for the struggle to be over. A thrilling challenge is one thing; struggle is another.

Enough is enough. And so a way has been found for the journey to continue, but for the struggle to be over. Tools have been given to you. One of them is The Law of Retraction, powered by Gratitude.

Using this tool takes you to the next stage on your Sacred Journey. It is the next step to mastery. Mastery is when the challenges become greater, but the struggle disappears.

If you have been suffering, it is not because you have been following The Path of the Soul. It is because you have taken a detour along a trail that led you away from The Path, forgetting to remember who you really are, why you are here, and where you were intending to go.

The Path of the Soul does not require or include suffering. The way for the struggle to be over is to
stay on The Path.
Gratitude returns you there. It speeds you in your evolution. It's the fast track.

You do not have to expand or grow or evolve at any particular rate, however. You can go through one entire lifetime reacting the same way to the same kinds of events. Many people do.
Most
people do. Only those who are deeply committed to growth, to their own personal and spiritual evolution, would spend the time and energy on choosing and changing their ­emotions—shifting from anger or frustration to Gratitude, for instance—in order to produce new and grander experiences of themselves.