Erin and I recently did a 35-minute video interview for the Alison and Jaye Show (see below). Most of the Q&A focuses on psychic development and communicating with spirit guides, including the benefits and pitfalls of receiving guidance from non-physical entities. We also discuss overcoming blocks to financial abundance near the end of the interview.

If you’re convinced there’s no such thing as psychic abilities, you can safely skip this interview because it won’t likely do much for you. This video is geared more toward people who already have some experiences with psychic phenomena as well as skeptics who are curious about this topic and want to learn more. By skeptics I’m referring to open-minded doubters but not close-minded disbelievers. If you aren’t open to this sort of thing, don’t press play.

If you liked this video, you may also enjoy listening to Erin’s recent 60-minute radio interview with Janice Marie Wilson, which covers similar topics and includes some Q&A with live callers.

Additionally, Erin is now offering an instant download of her PDF “10 Ways to Raise Your Vibration” when you sign up for her free newsletter. Raising your vibration essentially means feeling stronger, lighter, and happier and releasing feelings of depression, anxiety, fear, anger, guilt, shame, grief, etc. These techniques can also be used to boost your passion and motivation for action. The lower your vibration, the more you’ll be stuck in negative emotions, apathy, and helplessness. The higher your vibration, the stronger, happier, and more vibrant you’ll feel.

In case you’re wondering whether or not we’re going to cover psychic development during our Las Vegas workshop in October, the answer is no, not by design. If someone brings it up during Q&A, we’ll answer their questions, but this topic is too expansive to adequately cover in this particular workshop. We didn’t want our first workshop to require attendees to be receptive to psychic development. We’d have to plan a separate workshop to do this topic justice.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

An event is something that happens at a given place and time. An event is essentially a point or interval in space-time.

Place and time are both relative concepts.

To define a place, you need a reference location. Places are defined by relationships, such as by coordinates (relative to a coordinate system) or directions (relative to a starting location).

To define a time, you must also use relationships, such as a time’s relationship to the present moment or to another date and time.

When you try to define events in objective terms, you internally translate them into subjective terms anyway.

If someone gives you a date and time, you’ll naturally interpret it relative to your present moment or relative to some other event in your past or future or in your memories. If someone tells you a location, you naturally interpret it relative to your current location, your home, or some other location you’re familiar with. When and where only hold meaning when they can be translated into terms relative to your when and your where.

Events and Perception

All the dates and locations you have stored in your memory came from your perceptions. Maybe you experienced those events directly, or maybe you learned about them from another source. Either way that knowledge came via your perceptions. So it stands to reason that your entire knowledge of space-time comes through your perceptions. Hence, anytime you consider an event in space-time, you’re considering that event as filtered through your perceptions. You’re considering that event relative to yourself.

We like to think of objective frames of reference as things that exist outside of ourselves. When you say, “Let’s be objective about this,” it’s a suggestion for everyone to step outside their personal perspectives and to consider reality from a perspective that exists outside of them. In truth this is merely an illusion, however, since objectivity is always ultimately translated into subjective terms. We can’t escape the fact that all of space-time comes to us through our perceptions, including the memories we rely upon when we’re trying to be objective. Objectivity is something you had to learn about through your subjective senses.

You see… objectivity is simply an extra layer of abstraction on top of subjectivity. When you talk about objective events, what you’ve actually done is defined a space-time coordinate system relative to yourself, and then you placed events within that coordinate system. But if you remove the abstraction layer, you can see that you actually plotted events relative to yourself.

Even if you try to define an event that exists outside yourself, you’re still being self-referential (i.e. “outside of me”), and therefore you’re still being subjective.

The point here is that all events are both self-referential and subjective. You cannot have an event which is completely outside of you. You are in fact a necessary component of every event that occurs. You are the observer.

Objective Events

Suppose a bomb explodes in another city. You read about it in the news the next day. What is the actual event that occurred?

You might be inclined to say that the event was the explosion that happened the previous day. Its place is the other city where the explosion occurred. Its time is some particular time of day yesterday. This is how you would plot the event in space-time.

But if you define events this way, you aren’t paying attention to what really happened.

The actual event was your reading the news and learning about the explosion. Then you plotted that event in your memory. You imagined it and stored it.

Later on you may create new events by accessing your memory to recall that story. Memory is re-imagination.

The actual event occurred within your imagination. In fact, this is the only true location where events can occur.

Consider this: What if there was no bomb and no explosion? What if the news story was false? What if you read a retraction about that story the next day?

According to the original interpretation of this event, you got duped. The event never happened. The story wasn’t true.

And yet, you reacted as if the story had been true. Maybe it affected you emotionally. What caused that effect? It wasn’t the explosion, since no explosion actually occurred. Now if the explosion really had occurred, can you still claim that this was the actual event you were reacting to?

If this is how you interpret events, then you have to acknowledge that your mind is probably littered with lots of false events. You picked up untrue information through mistakes or intentional deception here and there, but you memorized it in the form of real events. This means you can’t really trust the contents of your own mind. Some of it is true. Some of it is false. And a lot of it is probably a mixture of truth and falsehood.

What effect will this have on you? It will create doubt, won’t it? If you know you’re capable of storing false events in your memory, then you can’t fully trust your memories, can you? You can’t be too sure of anything.

When you hear a report of a new event, how will you respond? If the event seems significant, you’ll probably want to verify the truth of it. You’ll be naturally skeptical. In fact, that would be the most intelligent approach because you wouldn’t want your mind to get cluttered with false memories. So skepticism is a natural result of a belief in objective events that occur outside of you. If your root assumption is that reality is objective in nature, then skepticism is a sensible strategy.

So if I tell you the President of the USA was assassinated today, you’ll want to verify that independently. It would be unwise for you to assume I’m telling you the truth. You’ll have some measure of doubt upon hearing such a report from just one person. It could be a lie, a trick, or something else entirely.

Also, it stands to reason that your mind will be filled with knowledge that you consider fuzzy. You’ll experience a lot of uncertainty in terms of trying to nail down what is true and what isn’t. What exactly happens at Area 51? What’s the real reason the USA invaded Iraq? Does your girlfriend really love you? Does your boss think you’re doing a good job? What’s the best diet to eat? Your life will be filled with such uncertainties.

Digging to uncover the truth becomes an endless quest. You can never eliminate uncertainty. The more you dig, the more questions you discover. The quest for objective truth is a metaphysical snipe hunt.

Am I suggesting that this interpretation of events is somehow wrong? Not at all. It’s a perfectly valid interpretation. I simply want to point out that this interpretation leads to certain natural consequences. It generates an endless loop of skeptical questioning and lifelong uncertainty. That isn’t a good or bad thing per se. It just is.

Subjective Events

Let’s return to our bomb story. What’s the subjective method of interpreting this event?

In this case we would say that your awareness of the story is the event. The story arises within your consciousness, and you perceive it. You imagine the explosion occurring. Your imagination impacts you and gives rise to other thoughts and feelings. This act of perception is in fact the event.

So what if the story turns out to be false? Does this invalidate what you experienced? No. You never objectified the explosion to begin with. There is no “out there.” Your perception is the event.

When you discover that the explosion never occurred, it doesn’t invalidate anything. Now you’re experiencing a new present-moment. You experience new thoughts and emotions. You’re still in the present moment experiencing the unfolding of a present-moment event.

Events are perception. If there’s no perception, there’s no event.

Since perception is a present-moment phenomenon, technically there are no events outside of the present. There is only one event, and it’s what’s happening right now.

When you learn that the bomb story was false, and you recall your reaction to that false story, you’re still in the present moment. You’re accessing your memories in the present. You’re experiencing your thoughts and feelings in the present.

Objective Truth

In objective reality we must deal with the duality of truth and falsehood. There can be true events and false events, and you can’t always tell the difference. If I tell you a story, you can’t be immediately sure if the story is true or false. Did it really happen or not? You can never know for certain because truth is something that exists outside your perceptions. Therefore it is unknowable. Consequently, you can never be aligned with truth as long as you believe in objectivity. The more objective you are, the more doubt you have.

If you really hold fast to an objective frame, then you can’t even trust your own memories. Objectively speaking, human memory is hideously unreliable. Much of what you think you know may turn out to be patently false, but you may never come to realize that it’s false. How much false information do you currently believe to be true? To be truly objective, you must hold serious doubts about the contents of your own mind. And that means you must also be doubtful of your belief in objectivity. Ultimately, the more objective you become, the more doubt you’ll experience. Eventually you will come to realize that you can know nothing and trust nothing. Some philosophers have gone that route, and perpetual doubt was the ultimate conclusion.

What’s the consequence of this philosophy?

Since you cannot discern objective truth from falsehood with total certainty, you’ll probably feel somewhat ungrounded and insecure. At first it may be a nagging feeling, but the more objective you try to be, the more this feeling will grow. The only way to really handle it in the long run is to release your need for certainty. Unfortunately this is a natural consequence of assuming that reality is objective in nature.

Subjective Truth

Now how do we define truth from a subjective perspective? First of all, truth can only exist in the present moment. Truth is whatever you’re experiencing right now. That is the only place you can have certainty. Your experience of your thoughts and feelings right now is true. You can trust your subjective experience. It is real because you perceive it as real. The now is your truth. This is the best place to ground yourself. You can trust this moment. It is real.

This is why so many meditation practices have you start by focusing on your breathing. Paying attention to your breath helps you re-connect to the present moment. Conscious breathing grounds you in what is real. You can experience truth simply by witnessing: I am breathing in. I am breathing out. I am breathing in. I am breathing out. This is real. This is truth.

From a subjective perspective, there’s no point in objectifying your memories. Recalling a memory is a present moment experience. Therefore it is real and true. A memory doesn’t have to be true in an objective sense. It only has to be true in the sense that you are experiencing that memory right now. It is true because it is a real, present-moment experience.

Using your imagination also gives you an experience of truth. When you imagine something, you’re having a true perceptual experience.

What is the long-term result of living within a subjective frame? Technically that question is nonsensical because the question is framed from an objective frame? Long-term implies living in the future, which cannot be aligned with subjective truth.

To phrase this question in subjective terms, we would need to ask, What is the present-moment reality of living within a subjective frame? Whereas objectivity is concerned with past and future, subjectivity is concerned only with right now.

When you ground yourself in the present moment, you can live in a state of certainty. You can know that your present moment experience is real. Consequently, you can become strongly aligned with truth when you hold to a subjective frame of reference. You can gradually let go of doubt and feel very centered in your experience of reality.

The Best Tool for the Job

Understanding the contrast between the objective and subjective lenses is a key to conscious living.

Let’s bring this abstract gobbledygook down to earth with some practical application by considering a few scenarios.

Career

How would you choose a career?

With an objective frame of reference, it’s about predicting the future. Where is the path going to take you? How will you get there? What are the risks? What will it be like?

With a subjective frame, the question doesn’t make much sense. You don’t really need a career. Instead your focus will be on what you can do right now. What would bring you joy in this moment? What will make you happy right now? What would you like to experience here and now?

For example, objectively speaking I can say that I’m a blogger or a writer or a personal development expert. I can talk about the projects I’m working on and the goals I’ve achieved. That would be one way to define my career.

Subjectively I could say, “Right now I am writing, and it feels good. I am happily writing.” I can tell you about the ideas flowing through my mind that I’m finding ways to express.

Which definition is more valid? Technically neither. But personally I like the subjective side because it’s a better fit for my real experience. It is more true. I do not know what tomorrow will bring. But right now, I know with certainty that I am writing. When I know I am in the here and now, I am aligned with truth. I feel certain and centered and harbor no doubts.

Relationships

How do you define your relationships?

Objectively your relationships are defined by their history and by your future plans. In order for a person to be a family member, friend, or lover, they must satisfy certain historical criteria.

Subjectively your relationships are defined by your feelings and your sense of connectedness. There’s no need to satisfy any particular objective requirements. A family member is anyone with whom you feel a familial bond. A friend is anyone you feel friendship towards.

I can talk about my relationship with Erin in terms of our 15-year history together. Or I can simply pay attention to the feelings I have for her right now.

This is another area where I find the subjective lens more empowering. I see a lot of pain in people who cling to the objective lens. For example, they remain stuck in relationships that do not feel good to them, partly out of loyalty to the past history together and the expected future obligations. Even in an objective sense though, it’s easy enough to predict that this is a path of long-term misery.

Health

How do you make sound health decisions?

Objectively you would have to learn a great deal about nutrition and the human body. And you’d still be riddled with doubt because so much of that information is contradictory. So you’d have to conduct lots of personal experiments and measure the long-term results to discover what works for you. With any luck you might figure a few things out before you die.

Subjectively you need only pay attention to the present moment experience of being in your body. When you eat notice how each food makes you feel? Observe your food cravings, and notice which ones feel good to indulge and which don’t.

I just took a short break from writing this article to eat a small apple.  Objectively I could talk about the vitamins in the apple, the health benefits of raw foods, the environmental consequences of eating apples, and so on.

Subjectively I can pay attention to how the apple makes me feel. I noticed that I was hungry, so I decided to eat the apple because it was visually attractive to me. It was sweet and crunchy and juicy. I don’t feel guilty for eating it, knowing that the apple tree that spawned it can continue to live out its life, none the worse for wear.

I can choose to monitor my health objectively, and I can also choose to monitor my health subjectively. I can get a medical checkup to see how all my organs check out. I can also notice when I’m stressed and do things that relax me. I can notice when my body feels sluggish and do things that energize me. If I’m depressed I can do things that make me laugh.

In this particular area, I’ve also gotten the best results from following the subjective path. I eat the foods and do the exercises that feel best to me. I avoid doing things that would make me feel guilty.

This morning I was going to go the gym as usual, but I checked in with myself and felt more inspired to go for a walk. So I walked around the neighborhood for 80 minutes, exploring some streets I’d never traveled. I discovered a small park, an elementary school, and a Hindu temple within walking distance that I never knew were there. I sat in the park for several minutes and watched the beautiful sunrise over the mountains. It was a perfect morning, subjectively speaking.

Living Subjectively

I’m not saying that the subjective frame is always the best tool for the job. However, more often than not I find it very valuable to view situations through a subjective lens instead of adding that extra layer of abstraction to consider them objectively.

Ask yourself: What am I experiencing now? What am I feeling? What would I like to experience now? What would I like to feel? Let your feelings inform your decisions. Then act on those decisions.

When you are not feeling good, you’re on the wrong path, so get off it! Stop doing what you’re doing immediately, and try something else. Test thoughts in your imagination by dreaming up other things you could do right now. Keep cycling through different thoughts until you find one that feels good. Then act on that thought. Then repeat.

If something feels wrong to you, it is wrong. If it feels right, it is right. Let that be your truth for a while. See what it’s like to live that way. You’ll soon discover that what you assumed would feel right sometimes feels wrong when you try it, and vice versa. But the more you live this way, the more you’ll discover what feels good to you consistently.

What fascinates me is how living subjectively actually causes life to work well from an objective perspective too. When you seek to create enduring happiness for yourself in the present moment, you will find yourself doing the very things that will take care of your bills, your relationships, and more.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

1. Admit There’s a Higher Truth

The first step is to consciously acknowledge what you’ve been feeling. Don’t be afraid to face up to your inner truths. If you want to live consciously, you must learn to accept truth in whatever form it comes to you. Sometimes you’ll discover inner truths that challenge you tremendously.

Within the belief system of Christianity, many controls are set up to discourage you from leaving. Rewards and threats are employed liberally. Stick with it and you’ll gain eternal life. Abandon it and you’re doomed to hell. Once enough people are integrated into such a system, the social conditioning becomes self-reinforcing. Members help to keep each other in line.

Recognize that you’re dealing with a control structure. When you see enforcement based on the promise of rewards and punishments, you’re not witnessing real truth. You’re witnessing marketing masquerading as truth.

Like many Americans I was raised as a Christian. All of my family and friends were Christian, so that was the only belief system I was exposed to. I knew nothing else. But as I took time to consider my core beliefs, I realized that the various elements of Christianity simply didn’t add up. It was filled with internal contradictions, and it was incongruent with my sensory experience of reality. I began to feel more and more disconnected from it. I often felt guilty because my Christian beliefs told me it was wrong to harbor such thoughts and feelings.

It helped me to realize that if God is almighty, then surely He can see into my heart. I cannot hide my true feelings from Him. He would know if I’m just going through the motions and that my heart isn’t in it. He can surely tell if I am a true Christian or just faking it. This realization helped me to accept the folly of subscribing to a belief system that no longer resonated with me.

Accepting the truth of your feelings is a powerful yet difficult step to take. It is a step you must take, however, if you are continue to grow as a conscious being. Never deny that you feel what you feel. If you have doubts about your beliefs, admit and accept those doubts as they arise. Realize that there exist deeper truths you have yet to discover.

2. Stop Going to Church

If you actively attend church services like Sunday mass, it’s a good idea to discontinue that habit. Disconnect from the continued reinforcement of your old beliefs, and give yourself some space to pull back and reflect on your life more consciously.

I used to attend church services religiously (pun intended). I attended mass every Sunday and on every religious holiday. I found these services to be incredibly boring and repetitive. The same scriptures were read every year. The same stories were retold again and again. The sermons were usually droning and uninspiring. Mass is basically a form of hypnosis. The next time you attend mass, sit in the front row, and turn around to observe the glazed-over eyes of the congregation in trance. It’s a scary sight, especially if you’re used to associating with people who are highly conscious and aware.

I stopped going to church when I was 17. Aside from occasional weddings and funerals, I’ve never been back. I’m glad I went through that experience, however, as it helps me relate to people who are in the process of making similar transitions.

I also used to go to confession regularly. I would tell a priest my sins, be forgiven, and be assigned a penance. When I finally abandoned this practice, I was empowered to make real improvements to my life instead of relying on a priest to perform magical acts.

In lieu of attending mass, I encourage you to transform Sunday mornings into a time of personal reflection at home. Take up the habit of journaling to explore your thoughts and feelings in private. Explore your spiritual side without the rules and constraints of a mass market belief system. Think of this time as your own personal retreat.

Transform the habit of church attendance into personal reflection. Don’t allow others to dictate what you should or shouldn’t believe since that will only turn you away from conscious growth.

If you miss the social element of going to church, consider forming your own spiritual meet-up group, or join an existing group of people who are more open-minded. I recommend that you focus on the experiential side of spiritual development. Erin and I used to host a weekly spiritual discussion group in our house. With such an interesting mix of people, it was never boring. I remember one fun session we had trying to practice telepathy. In another session we did an interesting group meditation. It costs nothing to do this, and if you form your own group, you can handpick the members.

You’re free to return to church later if you so desire. I certainly don’t miss it. My spiritual life is much richer without all the constraints and limits of Christianity.

Unplug yourself from group think, and discover what spirituality means to you as a unique individual.

3. Read the Bible Cover to Cover

Most Christians I know have never read the entire Bible. In fact, I’d say the vast majority haven’t even read 20% of the book’s content (I’m erring on the generous side here).

If you attend mass regularly for decades, you’ll be exposed to only a tiny fraction of the Bible’s contents… less than 5% I’d imagine. Partly this is because the same stories are read year after year, so every year of mass is essentially a repeat of the previous year. How long would you subscribe to my blog if I kept posting the exact same content every year?

If you’re going to call yourself a Christian, then at the very least, you should read the entire Bible cover to cover. Wouldn’t you agree? After all, it’s touted as the most important work of your entire faith. If you’d rather watch TV than finish reading the Bible, perhaps you aren’t cut out to be a Christian. Don’t worry — my blog will still be here in a few years when you’re done.

Now if you actually attempt this, it’s a safe bet that you’ll be bored to tears. The vast majority of the Bible’s content is very, very dull. It’s filled with long-winded genealogies and badly written stories. There’s a lot of aimless wandering in the desert. Very little of the Bible’s content is likely to be relevant or interesting to you. The good parts are few and far between. It’s an ideal cure for insomnia.

If you somehow manage to read the whole thing (an act that requires significant persistence), you’ll be left wondering what the big deal is. You’ll probably wish you’d spent that time reading something more interesting or educational.

The Bible is simply not a very interesting or useful book. Aside from the general dullness, it’s also filled with internal contradictions. This is intentional. You aren’t supposed to be able to make sense of it or discover profound truths on every page. The book is designed and marketed as a mystical work, such that you’re beholden to the Church as your interpreter. First they sell you a book you really wouldn’t want to read. Then they sell you a subscription service to the summary version, one that quotes the same passages year after year.

Try to read the whole book yourself, notice that there just isn’t much substance to it, and realize that an all-powerful God could surely have channeled a work of much higher quality. This realization will help you remove this book from a pedestal of mysticism. When you take the time to see that the Bible is little more than a mediocre work created by human beings, you’ll realize that it holds no special claim to your immortal soul.

4. Assess What You’ve Gained

Take a moment to consider some of the good you’ve gotten out of Christianity. Surely it wasn’t all bad. Feel grateful for the positive role it served in your life, and do your best to let the rest go.

In the end I retained many of the values I was taught as a Christian. One thing I appreciate about my Christian upbringing is that it taught me the value of service to others. After leaving the Church, I strayed from that concept for a while, but I successfully reintegrated it later in life. As an adult I’ve spent thousands of hours helping people in a variety of different ways, mostly for free, and I feel very good about that.

If you’ve had a rough time with Christianity as many people have, step back and look at the big picture. Notice the part it played in awakening your consciousness. In my case, the experience jolted me into accepting total responsibility for my own spiritual path, which was a powerful step for me. What role did Christianity play in your conscious development?

Be thankful for what you gained from your experiences as a Christian. Forgive and release everything else.

5. Connect With Jesus Directly

Since Jesus Christ is the central figure of Christianity, you may worry that if you turn away from the Church, you’ll lose your connection to Jesus. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, it’s easier to connect with Jesus without the Church. The main problem is that the Church tends to demonize the very skill set you need to connect with Jesus directly, so you’re stuck with priests as your interpreters. Unfortunately most priests are not very good interpreters because they lack these skills as well.

Jesus is a construct of consciousness. He remains unattached to any particular belief system. With practice you can tune in to him directly whenever you desire. Because of all the energy associated with Jesus as a thought form, he’s one of the easiest entities to connect to.

Sit quietly with your eyes closed. Take several deep breaths. Allow your body to physically relax, and visualize a meeting place in your mind. Mentally invite Jesus to come and talk to you. Wait patiently, and at some point you should be able to feel his energetic presence. Jesus has an extremely powerful energy. If you’ve taken the time to develop your psychic skills, you may feel a huge surge of emotion when he shows up. Usually I can’t help but cry when I do this because the energy of his presence is super strong. I’m actually getting a strong emotional hit just writing about this because I’m effectively pinging him by thinking about him.

I find Jesus’ energy to be so strong that I usually have to ask him to tone it down in order to communicate with him. ”Dude, can you rein in that aura a bit?”

Once you have a manageable connection, feel free to ask Jesus anything you want, and allow his answers to flow into your consciousness. Some people have used this connection to channel messages from him. It’s really not that hard to do if you develop the sensitivity to tune in and listen. If you haven’t developed this skill yet (which does take practice), you may find this exercise difficult to apply and the results, if any, hard to trust. If you really want to develop this skill though, read Erin’s blog because she’s written a lot about this.

I regard Jesus as a guide of unconditional love. He’s the go-to guy for questions related to love, oneness, and service. I often find his answers challenging to implement because he’s in such a perfect state of oneness. Whenever I think I’ve come really far in this area, he shows me how much more work I have to do and how many attachments I have yet to shed. Normally I prefer to consult with my own spirit guides because Jesus’ answers can be a bit too strong. Talking with him is like drinking a spiritual espresso.

You can also connect directly with other figures from Christianity such as Mary, various archangels, and saints. I find that Mary has a similar energetic signature to Jesus, but she comes through as more motherly. Sometimes Jesus, Mary, or various angels will make their presence known during my meditations if they have a message for me. Recently I’ve been connecting with a certain angel to help me solve a problem where I felt my guides were offering ineffective guidance. The angel was able to provide a higher level perspective that made the problem easy to solve.

How do you know if you’re connecting with real celestial beings? In truth you never really know. You can always argue that it’s just your imagination. But personally I’ve found it very effective to explore my spiritual growth in this manner. I consistently get good results from tuning in and asking for guidance from positive sources.

When you broaden your horizons beyond Christianity, you can connect with other religious icons as well. You aren’t limited to Christian figures. When you get good at meditating, you can summon anyone you wish. For example, in 2006 I did a meditation to connect with Quan Yin, and I posted the information I received from her as a blog entry called Desire in 2007.

I do not recommend you push forward with this skill set until you’re in a good place energetically, happy and at peace with yourself. You will most often attract beings that are close to your vibration. So if you attempt this when you’re feeling depressed, frustrated, greedy, or some other low-energy state, you’ll likely attract negative entities that offer counterproductive advice. And definitely never do this while drinking alcohol; you won’t be able to trust the results.

6. Diversify Your Relationships

It’s common for Christians to get stuck with inbred social circles. The religion does a good job of discouraging you from connecting deeply with non-Christians. But if you succumb to such limitations, you’ll severely limit your opportunities for growth.

Reach out and make friends with lots of non-Christians. Stop seeing people as either Christian or evil. Recognize that we’re all human beings together. We’re all part of the same whole. There is no us vs. them, saved vs. unsaved.

Put yourself in social situations you avoided as a Christian, if only for the experience. Go outside.

When I finally had the chance to associate with non-Christians, it was an eye-opening experience for me. I realized these people were not corrupt, evil, or misguided. Most of them were good and moral, and they didn’t require an order of priests to tell them how to think and behave.

These days I enjoy a lot of diversity in my friendships. I have friends who self-identify as Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, Jewish, Muslim, New Age, atheist, agnostic, etc. And I’m married to a Jewish psychic medium.

Do your best not to dismiss potential friends or relationship partners based on their spiritual beliefs. Get to know people as individuals. You’ll realize that you’re not so different after all. This will bring you more into alignment with the principle of oneness. Learn to regard everyone on this planet as a member of your family. There are no outcasts. We are all one.

7. Explore Other Belief Systems

As you expand your social circle, delve into other belief systems as well. Read a variety of books on spiritual development. Learn to meditate. Branch out and explore whatever interests you. I especially recommend that you study Eastern philosophies at some point, as a contrast to Western religions.

Many years ago I joined the Church of Scientology for a few months just to see what it was like. I went to one of their centers a couple times a week and spent hours talking to other Scientologists. I even had an official membership card. I found the experience fascinating. I had no interest in becoming a Scientologist long-term (and paying them hundreds of thousands of dollars like some people do), but I’m glad I did it. You always learn more about a belief system from the inside than you do from the outside.

If you study a lot of different belief systems as I have, you’ll learn that no one has a monopoly on your soul. All of these belief systems are man-made and flawed. Some are driven by powerful marketing machines. Whether you subscribe to any of them or not is of little concern to the rest of the universe.

Follow the path of conscious growth. If you feel that the best way to maximize your growth is to adhere to a particular belief system for a time, go for it. But remain alert for when your inner voice tells you that it’s time to move on. If you’re no longer excited by your spiritual path, that’s a powerful indicator that you’re ready to graduate to something else. Don’t buy in to religious marketing messages that urge you to stick around longer than you should.

8. Develop Your Own Moral Code

Christianity teaches you a basic system of morality. It’s a good start, but it has many flaws. Some elements are outdated. Others are impractical. Priests are frequently caught violating the moral code they’re preaching.

You probably disagree with various elements of Christianity. Which parts do you think are lame? Do you think pre-marital sex is bad? Is divorce a sin? What about using contraception? Telling white lies? Looking at porn? Using “Jesus Christ” as a swear word? (Seriously, Jesus doesn’t mind if you do that.)

Are you seriously going to hell for bending the rules? Or do you feel the rules are messed up to begin with? Would most Christians agree or disagree with your exceptions?

My guess is that on a practical level, you’re not a big fan of rigid rules, but you do see the value in living your life by a certain moral code. You probably think of yourself as a good person, and you want to live a good and moral life. You don’t want to go around hurting people, and you’d like to make a reasonable contribution to help this planet. Sometimes you screw up and violate your own values, but you feel best when you can forgive yourself, learn from those experiences, and move on.

This is all well and good. But I’d encourage you to take it a step further. Put in the time to codify your personal moral philosophy in writing. Where do you draw the line between right and wrong? How do you make moral decisions?

This is where you must do some serious soul searching.

If you’d like a shortcut to help you get started, I’ve written a whole book about it. That book is the result of my own act of soul searching to codify the principles of conscious growth. If you haven’t read it yet, no worries. I’ll give you the short version right now.

The three most fundamental principles of conscious growth are Truth, Love, and Power. You will find that these principles align with what you already intuitively know to be true. If you wish to develop any sort of moral code, then in some way it must incorporate these principles. Whenever you turn away from these principles, you turn your back on conscious growth.

To its credit Christianity does a decent job of stressing the importance of Love. Jesus’ teachings are all about unconditional love. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Turn the other cheek.” Those are worthy messages. Unfortunately the Church doesn’t do a good job of modeling this ideal in practice. It encourages separation between Christians and non-Christians. It creates division instead of promoting unity. You’re either saved or you’re not. Many Christians are raised to be rather unloving toward non-Christians, including the priests themselves. That is unfortunate because this is not at all what Jesus taught.

Christianity does a poor job of embracing Truth. It claims to value honesty and it does promote some degree of self-awareness, but that’s about it. Beyond that it markets a variety of fictional stories as indisputable truth. It doesn’t teach people to accurately interpret and accept what their senses tell them. And it largely ignores the importance of prediction. The lack of Truth-alignment is why many Christians find this belief system largely unhelpful in their day-to-day practical lives. So they’re Christians on Sundays but not on weekdays. Because Christianity is disconnected from Truth, it’s out of touch with reality. If you want to grow in your career, finances, or health while maintaining a strong spiritual focus, you’re basically on your own.

Christianity falls flat in the area of Power too. It teaches people to become dependent on the Church for spiritual guidance instead of cultivating real power as independent conscious beings. It promotes fear and timidity instead of courage. It teaches you to give your power away to an external authority instead of developing your own authority and creativity as a conscious being.

If you want to create an effective moral code for yourself, it must be solidly grounded in reality (aligned with Truth), it must help you cultivate a sense of unconditional love and connection (aligned with Love), and it must empower you to grow (aligned with Power). If it fails to satisfy any of these conditions, then your moral code is ultimately turning you away from conscious growth.

As explained in my book, my moral code is based on aligning my life with the 7 principles of conscious growth. The first three are Truth, Love, and Power. The other four are Oneness (Truth + Love), Authority (Truth + Power), Courage (Love + Power), and Intelligence (Truth + Love + Power). I am doing right when I am living in accordance with these principles. I am doing wrong (or sinning, so to speak) when I turn my back on any of these principles. This is a demanding code, but it ensures that I keep growing year after year without stagnating or getting sidetracked.

Your success at following your own moral code is for no one to judge but you. Only you know your true intentions. What might seem like an act of cowardice from an outsider’s perspective might have required extreme courage on your part. What might be viewed as an unloving act could have been driven by a deep sense of compassion for others. You must evaluate yourself.

Are you living in accordance with your highest ideals? When you commit those ideals to writing, it’s much easier to see how well you’re doing.

9. Deal Compassionately With Christian Friends and Family

I know this is a big issue for many graduating Christians. Once you feel ready to progress beyond Christianity, how do you handle your old Christian family and friends? How will they react to your decision?

When I decided to move on at age 17, my family took it very badly, as if I’d personally assaulted them. It was not a pretty sight. My friends mostly gave me strange looks and didn’t worry about it, so I didn’t have any difficulties at school, but my family was a different story.

It’s a shame that so many Christians react negatively when someone decides to unsubscribe. But you must understand that this is the nature of the beast. The Christian belief system encourages this kind of reaction. Your family and friends have been taught that if you leave the Church, you’ll be doomed to hell. Naturally they don’t want to see that happen. So their negative reaction is actually a sign that they care about you very much. Burning you at the stake may seem like a funny way of expressing love, but it is what it is. Some Christians simply have a lot to learn about expressing love toward non-Christians.

Another problem is that when you leave the Church, you stir up other Christians’ fears and doubts. You push them to face parts of themselves they aren’t ready to face. This can generate quite a backlash against you.

I know it’s hard to maintain this level of understanding when you’re currently being stoned, verbally or otherwise. I certainly wasn’t in a place where I could say, “Thank you for caring about my immortal soul” when people were treating me like I’d turned to the dark side. I’m glad I can hold this perspective today though.

I don’t think it’s helpful to get into arguments and long-winded debates with other Christians when you’re on your way out. All that does is create additional stress. This is a time where you should quietly slip out the back door, at least to the degree that’s possible. This is a time to reconnect with your spiritual side and focus on your inner development. You have a lot of healing to do and a lot more growth to prepare for.

Being treated like a demon for dropping Christianity certainly didn’t help me much. The negative reaction from Christians simply turned my doubts into certainty. In retrospect that was unfortunate because it wasn’t until seven years later that I was able to start consciously re-exploring my spiritual side. That was eventually triggered when all the 11:11 stuff started popping up in my life.

When I told my family I didn’t believe in Christianity anymore, the reaction was so negative that I felt the most reasonable course of action was to back off. I felt that forcing the issue wasn’t worth the loss of things like car privileges. I was going away to college in a year anyway, so I knew the conflict period would eventually fade. Consequently, I went through the motions and continued going to mass for many months. But I insisted on sitting in another part of the church, quietly slipping out the back and going for walks outside instead. Eventually I was caught because I got back late one time, and interestingly that ended the surface conflict with my family. They must have realized that they weren’t going to regain my soul with demands and threats. Turning 18 and going away to college was a major stress reliever for me, but my experiences led me to pre-judge Christians as people I could never really trust. I felt much safer in the company of atheists and agnostics.

It’s unfortunate that Christianity should create such rifts between people. I’ve seen countless others deal with similar problems. Almost invariably it’s the Christians that force these disconnections, while the non-Christians would like nothing more than to continue sharing a loving (or at least civil) relationship. Jesus did not come here to teach conditional love!

On the bright side, I learned a lot from this experience. In the long run, it taught me to be much more accepting of others, including Christians. I do my best not to push people away because of their beliefs. I may challenge people’s beliefs a lot, and there are some belief systems I hold in fairly low regard, but I still accept those who choose to hold such beliefs. I think the world would be much better off if each of us would develop the capacity to love and accept everyone as they are, regardless of whether or not we agree with them.

This mindset of unconditional acceptance can be a challenge to practice, but it serves me well. For example, as a vegan, I don’t condone acts of animal cruelty, including the consumption of animal products. I will not even harm insects. But I still accept those who think it’s okay to hurt animals, even though their actions violate my own moral code. Non-acceptance does not encourage people to live more compassionately.

If you’re facing a tough situation with your Christian friends and family, possibly debating whether or not to tell them of your decision, I feel for you. I know it isn’t easy. But in the long run, my best recommendation is to tell them the truth. That will put the ball in their court. Then it’s up to them to decide if they can love and accept you as you are. Unfortunately you can’t control the outcome. But you’ll soon find out whether they practice Jesus’ teachings about unconditional love or if they’ve been brainsquashed by the Church to reject you as an outcast.

Even if you become the family pariah at first, some of those people may eventually come around. Be patient. Go out and live the best life you can. When they’re ready they may choose to reconnect with you. You’ll have the best effect on them by being an example of conscious living, not by trying to convince them to accept your decision.

As long as your family and friends subscribe to a belief system that defines you as an outcast — as a person doomed to burn in hell — the doorway to a truly conscious connection remains closed. All you can do is hold the intention that they’ll eventually progress beyond that stage and learn to accept others fully and completely. In the meantime you can still accept and love them as they are, even if they find it difficult to do the same.

Rest assured that if you’re dealing with a situation like this, you’re not alone. You are not doing anything wrong or evil. The Christian religion itself is the problem. It is set up to create these artificial conflicts. It really is time for humanity to progress beyond this level of separation and bigotry. We need to accept that we’re all in this together.

10. Release the Guilt and Enjoy Your Freedom

My final piece of advice to you is to let go of all the guilt you absorbed during your time as a Christian. Forgive yourself and others completely. Let go and move on with your life.

Rest assured you’re not going to hell. You won’t be punished in the afterlife for declining to follow a man-made belief system. You are an explorer and a creator, not the servant of a multi-billion dollar organization that claims divine sponsorship. You are here to participate in the expansion of consciousness.

Know that you are a good person. Learn to love and accept yourself unconditionally. It doesn’t matter if you’re a saint or sinner by Christian standards. You are worthy of love no matter what. It’s time to step into your true power. Your light has been dimmed for far too long.

If all else fails and you find yourself feeling unloved, rest assured that I love you and care about you. It doesn’t matter if we’ve never met. It doesn’t matter if you don’t agree with half the stuff I write about. I love and care about you anyway.

Being a Christian was an important stage in your conscious development, but now you’re ready to progress beyond it. You no longer need others to define and control your spiritual identity. You’re ready to blaze your own spiritual trail. You have graduated. Congratulations!

Now go out and do some serious good with your life. Make it a masterpiece. Show this world your beautiful divinity.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

For example, people write to me all the time saying that they wish they could start a successful blog, but they just don’t know how. They act as if I was magically bestowed with some kind of insider blogger’s knowledge that isn’t equally accessible to them. The truth is that no one really knows how to do something new until they’ve done it. Imagine Wayne Gretzky saying, “I wish I could play hockey, but dammit — I just don’t know how.”

If you were to give those very same complainers a greater incentive to get moving, such as a million-dollar bribe for generating measurable results within 30 days, you’d find that their empty excuses and pointless whining are solidly blasted out of the water. Somehow the lack of knowledge is no longer a serious obstacle for them. (Yes, I’m being harsh on purpose. When such people are in front of me, I prefer to smack them, but in this case I’ll have to settle for a verbal smack.)

I’ve written about this topic before, but this time I’ll tackle it from a totally different angle. In the past I’ve pointed out that with sufficient motivation, you’ll simply go out and acquire whatever knowledge you need. All the raw how-to information you need is probably available online for free anyway. Either that or you can figure out what you need via trial and error if you just start taking action.

Instead of looking at the motivation side, let’s consider the excuse side. Claiming that you lack certain knowledge is an act of denying yourself permission to experience what you desire. It’s a way of blocking yourself from moving toward your goal.

The physical and mental act of acquiring knowledge is really a projection of a deeper event that occurs within your consciousness. That event is the act of giving yourself permission to progress to a new “vibration,” to shift away from your current experience of reality and to graduate to a new experiential level. When your consciousness experiences that internal shift, all the knowledge you need will practically show up at your doorstep. In many cases you don’t even require new knowledge, but if you think you need it, then you’ll experience a learning phase in your physical reality as you progress to the next level.

Why would you ever want to block yourself from going up a level? Why would you stay stuck for so long with feeble excuses like ”I don’t know how” or “I don’t know what to do”?

The answer is that you aren’t ready to progress yet. You haven’t soaked up all the lessons from your current reality. Energetically speaking, you still need to experience and accept some of the energy patterns swirling about you.

To use a video game analogy, imagine your current reality as a level from Pac-Man. You can’t progress to the next level until you gobble up all the pellets on the current map. It’s not a matter of putting in a certain amount of time. If you try to wait it out, you’re just waiting for death. It’s a matter of completion. You can run around the map for quite a while, but if you don’t pick up that last pellet, you’re going to be stuck on that level until you die.

People who complain about not progressing are like Pac-Man players who complain that they can’t pass the current level. Maybe you’re complaining that you can’t figure out how to get those last few pellets. That’s usually because those pellets are on the other side of the ghosts (i.e. your fears). It may take you a long time to pass the level if you always run from the ghosts. Perhaps you need to swallow a power pill (i.e. grow a pair) and run straight at the ghosts of fear to pass the current level. Pac-Man isn’t a game for fraidy cats; nor is real life.

For many years I was stuck at the financial level of being broke. I was constantly struggling against debt, but you can’t pass a level by resisting it and hoping that you somehow get a mercy pass. You have to accept and work with the game board as it is. My solution was to turn toward the ghosts (my fear) and realize that I could still be happy even if I was broke. I learned to stop trying to make money with a scarcity mindset and to start expressing my creativity with an abundance mindset. In truth I had to pick up a lot of pellets (lessons) on the financially broke level, but once I got them all, I was able to progress to a new financial level rather quickly. Of course that new level had plenty of other interesting pellets/lessons to gobble up.

When you’re stuck at a certain level in your health, relationships, finances, career, spiritual growth, or personal habits, and you can’t seem to make any progress, take a moment to stop and look around. The universe knows you want to reach the next level. It’s not blocking you to frustrate you. You’re blocking yourself because deep down, you know you aren’t ready for the next level yet. You still have more lessons to acquire right where you are.

Is the point of playing Pac-Man to get to the next level as quickly as you can? Not really. The point is to have fun.

Is the point of life to immediately jump to a state of infinite health, wealth, relationship nirvana, and spiritual bliss? Of course not. The point is to enjoy the progression through various lessons that help you develop and expand your consciousness. When you pass each level, your reward is a new level with… you guessed it… more lessons. If you don’t learn to enjoy the lessons and the process of growth itself, you’re surely going to stagnate.

If you stop resisting where you are, you’ll find that life becomes a beautiful thing, regardless of what level you’re currently experiencing. You can anticipate the next level while still having immense fun right where you are.

If you want to level up, you have to acknowledge the ghosts on your level. They may seem like bullies, obstacles, or dangers, but in truth their purpose is to make you a better player and to provide you with an interesting experience.

Imagine playing Pac-Man with no ghosts. Every level would be the same. It would be incredibly boring. Nobody would play it. Similarly, no one would want to come to earth and partake in this human experience if there were no ghosts to face here. The ghosts make it interesting.

Confronting ghosts develops your consciousness. Ghosts help you discover new truths about yourself. They motivate you to get moving and pursue your goals. They make you stronger. When you face ghosts, you discover what kind of player you really are. That’s a priceless gift.

To pinpoint the ghosts on your current level, ask yourself, “What parts of my reality am I currently resisting, and why? What parts of my reality do I refuse to fully accept?”

When you’re about to go up a level in a video game, what kind of emotions do you feel? I usually feel a sense of excitement, fun, and gratitude. Don’t you basically feel the same way when you level-up in real life?

When you aren’t close to that level-up feeling, it means you aren’t ready to level up.

Leveling up occurs when you’ve completed the current level. This doesn’t mean you tie up every loose end in your life. It simply means that you’ve integrated the key lessons you needed to learn.

If you’re broke and wanting to experience financial abundance, have you learned the key lessons of being broke? Are you feeling immensely grateful for everything that financial scarcity has taught you? Or are you still running away from your ghosts?

If you’re single and wanting to experience a relationship, have you learned the lessons of being single at this time in your life? Do you feel happy and grateful when you’re alone because of all the beautiful gifts you’ve gained from it? Or are you railing against it, thereby preventing yourself from moving on?

If you’re struggling to figure out your life purpose and/or to choose a career direction, have you learned the lessons of being directionless? Do you feel grateful for the freedom and limitlessness of options you have right now? Or do you still resist your current experience of reality?

You can’t move forward in life by hating where you are.

Whenever you resist your reality, you deny your own creative power. You make yourself powerless to progress. You’re like a Pac-Man player that swears “I hate this game” and slams the joystick in anger. That isn’t going to help you level up.

When you’re ready to be grateful for your current experience of reality, warts and all, you’re ready to level up. Now you’re reclaiming your creative power, which is the very power you need to manifest the new level you desire. When you rail against the reality you’re experiencing, you simultaneously deny your power to create something new.

Resistance is powerlessness. Acceptance is power.

Imagine an artist surrounded by her paintings. Suppose she dislikes them so much that she denies creating them. Is that going to put her in a place to go and paint something better? Of course not. She’ll probably just sit around sulking.

Now imagine that same artist, feeling grateful for all the paintings she created. She acknowledges that she created them. This doesn’t mean she feels they’re her best work, but she appreciates each piece for what it taught her. Her early work may not be much to look at, but it’s still precious. The true gift she experienced from creating all that art was her progressive refinement as an artist.

Similarly, when you look at any part of your life with disdain, you deny that you’re the artist who created it. Maybe it’s your early work, and it’s not much to look at, but you can’t progress by denying that it’s yours.

What would be the market price for Picasso’s first crappy pre-school drawing today? Don’t deny the value of your own ”suck period.”

When people do make progress — real progress — in some area of their lives, how do they look back on their past experiences? Usually they look back with gratitude, nostalgia, love, and appreciation. If they look back with resistance, they’re probably still repeating those same lessons in their lives today.

I don’t hate the years of my life when I was broke. I look back on those times with fondness. I smile when I remember how Erin and I squeezed three people and two businesses into a small apartment on a noisy street. It’s funny to remember that we once used a cardboard box as a piece of furniture. I was able to move on from that period of my life because I allowed myself to fully accept it. I now know how important it was for me to have those experiences. I’m very glad that I went through that period. It was a cool level to play through.

What about those times when I was arrested and stuck in jail? I feel grateful for those experiences too. I don’t look back and feel hatred towards anyone. But at the time, I resisted those experiences tremendously. That’s why I had to keep repeating them. I wasn’t ready for the next level. Eventually I learned to fully accept those experiences because of what they taught me. For starters, those experiences turned me on to the pursuit of personal growth.

Are there still parts of my life that I’m resisting today? Of course. We all have those blocks. When we’re ready to face them, we’ll do so.

Blocking yourself from reaching the next level isn’t the end of the world. It’s okay to be where you are and to stay there for a while — assuming that’s what you want to experience. For example, income-wise you may hold yourself at a certain level because you’re still soaking up the experience. Maybe you don’t want to boost your income because you’re quite happy with your current level. That’s absolutely fine.

When a block becomes a problem is when you feel stunted and trapped in your reality. You anxiously crave different experiences, and you’re bored or frustrated with the doldrums of your current level. That’s a signal that you need to turn toward those ghosts and face them head-on. It’s time to build your strength and move forward.

Long-term stuckness boils down to running from fear — fear of failure, fear of success, fear of rejection. We all run from these fears at times. We’re only human. Lots of stuff scares us. Even the best Pac-Man players spend a lot of time running from ghosts. Ghosts are scary.

But we’re also more than human. We’re creators. We have the power within us to dig deep and proclaim, “Enough of this. I’m summoning my power to create a new reality.” We can self-prescribe a power pill. But in order to summon this power, we MUST acknowledge and accept what we’ve already created.

Imagine the Biblical God visiting this planet and saying, “Adam and Eve? Heaven and Earth? Nope, wasn’t me!” That’s what we do when we resist some aspect of our current reality. A mountain of debt? A sucky relationship? No, wasn’t me! Yeah, right… as if the credit card charges just appeared out of thin air and the wedding ring was glued to your finger by a mischievous fairy.

Look around at your reality for a moment, take a deep breath, stick your chest out, and say, “Yup… that was ME!” Take credit for all that you’ve created, even if you don’t think you deserve it. When you claim credit for what you’ve already created, you simultaneously summon the power to create something new. Never deny what you’ve created. That would cause me to smack you. (I swear your cheek LoA’d my palm!)

Your best bet is to assume that you’ve created everything in your reality — and for good reason. With respect to everything in your reality that you currently resist, say to yourself, “Okay, let’s assume I did create this. Now why would I do something like that? What could this possibly do for me?”

Look for the hidden benefit, lesson, or message behind everything in your reality that bugs you.

In order to do this properly, you have to look beyond the physical. Look at how it affects your consciousness. What benefits might you be able to retain even after death?

Use the TLP framework from the book Personal Development for Smart People to help classify your experiences. How are these experiences bringing you into greater alignment with Truth, Love, and Power? What about Oneness, Authority, Courage, and Intelligence? The cool thing about these principles is that they’re rooted in consciousness, not in physical reality, so they can help you see the empowering lessons behind all of life’s challenges, regardless of the particulars. The nice thing about universal principles is that they can be applied to any situation.

Don’t think of yourself as a physical being. Think of yourself as a conscious being. You aren’t here to develop your physical life. You’re going to lose all of it when you die anyway. Everything you build here will eventually crumble. The human race itself will die off too. But consciousness is eternal.

Physical reality is a playground for the development of your consciousness. Your physical body, your bank account, your material possessions, your home and family – none of that stuff really matters in the long run. Eventually it will all be gone. If you get too attached to those things, I guarantee you a lot of frustration and emptiness down the road. You’ll get that slow sinking feeling that something isn’t right about your life. Instead, focus your primary attention in this life on the development of your consciousness. That’s why you’re here.

Work on your physical body because such a pursuit develops your consciousness. Build your discipline by challenging yourself to eat foods you know are healthy for you. Build your compassion by refusing to kill and torture animals for the sake of your taste buds. Build your courage and authority by eating the way you feel is right, regardless of what others think.

Work on your finances because such a pursuit develops your consciousness. Expand your creativity by creating value for others. Cultivate an abundance mindset by learning to let go of scarcity thinking. Build your focus and discipline by working hard. Experience freedom by creating passive income instead of living paycheck to paycheck.

Work on your relationships because such a pursuit develops your consciousness. Build your courage by learning to be open and honest about your feelings. Increase your alignment with oneness by getting to know lots of people and realizing that we’re all part of the same whole. Deal with difficult people to learn unconditional love.

Get the idea?

Learn to embrace the Truth. Learn to connect with what you Love. Learn to channel your creative Power fully. Your problems are there to help you progressively train up your alignment with these principles. The purpose of your physical life is to help you improve the TLP-alignment of your consciousness. That’s something you can take all the way to the grave and beyond.

You are here to shine, not to whine.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

One of your greatest challenges as a human being is learning how to live as a vibrational being in a vibrational universe.

Attracting Compatible Patterns

You don’t attract into your life what you want. You don’t attract what you think about. You don’t attract what you feel. Desires, thoughts, and feelings are all important, but these are more effects than causes.

You attract what you’re signaling.

Think of yourself as a vibrational transmitter. You’re constantly sending out signals that tell the universe who you are in this moment. Those signals will either attract or repel other vibrational beings, events, and experiences.

You naturally attract that which is in harmony with your state of being, and you’ll repel that which is out of sync with your state.

If your energetic self radiates wealth and abundance, your physical reality will reflect wealth and abundance for your physical being.

If your energetic self radiates anger and frustration, your physical reality will reflect that as well.

Since the signals you’re sending out at any given moment tend to be fairly complex, your experience of physical reality will be equally complex.

Once you can accept that your vibrational self attracts compatible patterns, it becomes clear that if you want to experience something different in your life, you must somehow change the signals you’re putting out.

Your Vibrational Hum

Listen to the vibrational hum of your being. Quiet your mind, tune in to your inner being, and listen to the ever-broadcasting radio station that is you. What types of signals are you broadcasting in this moment?

When I tune in for a moment, I can sense some of the signals that are emanating from me. I can feel that I’m radiating happiness and joy. I can sense that I’m sending out signals to attract positive, loving new relationships into my life. I can sense that I’m radiating financial abundance and increase. I can sense that my energy is very mental at the moment because I’m writing this article.

These are all thoughts, however. The true signal I’m emitting isn’t a thought. It’s a frequency. I might describe this frequency in words, but I can never get the words quite right because human language is inadequate to the task. If I try to describe my current signal anyway, I might use the following adjectives: flowing, smiling, happy, peaceful, soaring, white, soft, strong, expanding, warm, mindful, smooth, and energized.

I can also tune into signals from my environment. I can sense that my belly is broadcasting satiety since I just had lunch (a mixed green salad and some olives). I can observe that it’s 49 degrees F outside. I can hear soft music coming from my computer speakers (sound is yet another vibration). I can subtly perceive Erin’s signal transmitting from the next room. I can feel the combined energy of the people reading my articles around the world.

Overall, I can sense that the signals I’m sending out and the signals coming from my environment are in sync. I feel happy, peaceful, and abundant, and my environment reflects that. This is a stable state, one I experience often.

Your energy signature is the summation of all the signals you’re sending out. Your thoughts and feelings aren’t the cause of these signals though; your thoughts and feelings are actually effects of the signals. If you change the signal you’re emitting, your thoughts and feelings will shift as well.

Vibrational Equilibrium

Your vibrational being and your environment will tend to move toward equilibrium over time. If your current life situation appears fairly stable, it’s safe to say that you’re maintaining equilibrium.

For example, if you’re financially broke, and if this is a stable situation that has persisted for some time, then it’s likely that most of the energetic signals you’re exposing yourself to are also vibrating at a similar frequency of broke-ness. This includes the place you live, the people you interact with, your work environment, the events on your calendar, your furniture, and so on. Your being is immersed in a field of these signals, and this encourages you to vibrate at the same level.

If you continue to surround yourself with signals that reinforce your current state, then that state will persist indefinitely. You may be able to get away from it for a while, but you’ll keep coming back to it if that’s your equilibrium.

Shifting Your Vibration

Creating a temporary shift in your vibration is easy. You can create such a change in seconds. Jump around and move your body. Sing your favorite song. Smile for a minute. Hold a yoga pose. Take a cold shower. All of these will change your state. However, this won’t create any sort of lasting change if you return to your old vibration afterwards. If your dominant signal remains unchanged, your equilibrium won’t shift.

In order to shift your equilibrium, you need to break the old equilibrium. This means you must create a lasting disconnect between your current vibration and the environmental vibrations that are compatible with it.

There are basically two ways to do this.

First, you can shift your own vibration long enough to create a lasting disconnect with your current environment. If you start transmitting a new signal, you’ll soon repel whatever in your environment is incompatible with your new signal. You’ll also begin attracting other people, events, and experiences that are compatible with your new signal. Hold the new vibration long enough, and you’ll see your whole physical reality change all around you.

You can apply this approach by visualizing your goals very vividly for at least 20 minutes per day. Visualize in such a way that you can feel strong emotions. An emotional shift indicates that you’re broadcasting a new signal. The longer you can hold this new vibration, the faster your reality will shift.

The second method is to intentionally replace many of your environmental signals with new ones. Then you must hold yourself in that new environment. This will feel uncomfortable at first because you won’t initially be compatible with those new signals. You must allow them to recalibrate your own vibration until you become compatible with them.

You can apply this approach by changing your environmental landscape — physically, socially, and otherwise. For example, stop spending time with your lazy friends, give away your TV, and hang out every day with the most productive people you know. This will feel uncomfortable at first, but eventually you’ll start to integrate those new signals, and your own vibrational pattern will soon shift to come into resonance with these new people.

So to sum up, you can either change the signal you’re emitting, or you can change the signal soup you’re immersed in. Either way can be very effective at creating a lasting change in your vibrational pattern.

Creating What You Desire

To create what you want in your life, you must shift your vibrational pattern such that you’re emitting a signal that’s vibrationally compatible with your goals and desires.

You can identify that new vibration by vividly visualizing your goals until you feel different emotions, and those emotions stabilize at a certain point. Notice how your vibrational inner being feels, not just emotionally but energetically. Then return to your old state, and notice the vibrational difference between the two states. Compare and contrast the old vibration with the new one.

For example, here’s how I’d describe the vibration of being broke and deep in debt, a frequency I emitted for many years: tight, knotted, twisted, chaotic, rough, blurry, red, dark, fast, changing, pressed, and squeezed.

Here’s how I’d describe the vibration of financial abundance: open, free, clear, bluish-white, flowing, smooth, bright, focused, and intense.

Each vibration has a different energy signature. If I temporarily shift my default vibration to a state of feeling broke (just by imagining it as real), I can feel my vibrational self shifting its frequency too. If I held that vibration long enough, I’d soon find that my physical reality followed suit.

Hopefully it’s obvious by now that if you want to shift your vibration, it’s a bad idea to consistently expose yourself to incompatible signals. Watch the TV news about the ongoing financial meltdown and the recession/depression, and notice what happens to your vibration. Then notice what happens to your finances in the long run. If you want to experience financial abundance, this is a very bad time to watch or read mainstream news. This is the perfect time to read high-quality books or articles instead.

Learning to sense and control the vibrational frequencies you’re emitting is powerful stuff. Once you really get this, you can intentionally shift your frequency at will to experience what you desire.

If you want to experience wealth, you can create that. If you want to experience a new relationship, you can create that too. If you want high energy and good health, you can create that as well.

This isn’t to say that it will be easy for you to accomplish all of these things. It takes practice to adjust your vibrational frequency correctly, so be patient with yourself. Rome wasn’t manifested in a day.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

11:11 tends to be discussed mainly in private, among people who are already familiar with it or those who are just awakening to it. I haven’t seen much written about it online, at least not with the level of depth and clarity that really rings true for me. A few people, including Uri Geller, have spoken about it, but most of the material on 11:11 tends to be fairly obscure.

I’ve had a small 11:11 in the lower right corner of my website for years. It’s there mainly as a nod to people who already know what it means. I suspect most people never notice it. When people email me to ask me what it means, I usually tell them that if they don’t already know, they can safely ignore it. To those who do know what it means, it serves as a type of identifier and can spawn some interesting interactions.

What Is 11:11?

There are many levels on which to explain 11:11. I’ll start with the most basic physically observable level and move up from there. This will take a bit of explaining.

11 is a number of course, and 11:11 is a time on a clock. Some very small percentage of people will begin to encounter 11:11 as well as the number 11 more often than chance would indicate — so much more often that you may think you’re in the midst of some crazy conspiracy once you begin to notice it.

If you’ve seen the Jim Carey movie The Number 23, there’s a similar concept behind it, although that movie is far removed from the actual experience. You may indeed think you’re going a bit nuts at first, but that will eventually pass, and soon you’ll be lead to some fascinating new insights about reality.

Numerologically speaking, you can take any number that appears in your life and sum up the digits. If you end up with a number greater than 11, keep re-summing the digits until you’re at 11 or less.

For example, my ZIP code is 89138.

8 + 9 + 1 + 3 + 8 = 29, and 2 + 9 = 11.

My previous ZIP code was 89129

8 + 9 + 1 + 2 + 9 = 29, and 2 + 9 = 11.

My current phone number is 991-1252

9 + 9 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 5 + 2 = 29, and 2 + 9 = 11.

If we include the area code, my phone number is (702) 991-1252.

Those digits sum to 38, and 3 + 8 = 11.

The fascinating thing about 11:11 is that it runs backwards and forwards through one’s life. So when you first start noticing the 11s in your life, you’ll find they run through your past as well as your present and future.

When I was first exposed to this idea, I thought I was going nuts because it seemed that my whole life was infested with these hidden 11s.

My awareness of this phenomenon began in early 1994, shortly before I met Erin. I started noticing hidden 11s everywhere. I lived in apartment 119. My first retail computer games was published at this time, and the digits of the game’s bar code game summed to 29. I owned 92 CDs, and my favorite music group had 11 albums. My previous four phone numbers summed to 11. The model # of my wrist watch was 5600, and my TV’s model # was 2720. My computer’s hard drive was 245 megs in size, but I got 380 with compression software.

In addition to the numbers, you’ll see the time 11:11 on the clock disturbingly often. Sometimes I will suddenly look up at a clock and notice this time twice a day for several days in a row. It’s rare that more than a few days go by without my noticing an 11:11 on a clock somewhere.

In fact, I just went to the kitchen to grab a snack while writing this article, and there was 11:11am winking at me from the clock on the microwave.

My daughter Emily was actually born at 11:11pm. That’s a hard one to ignore.

A Backdoor Virus

Now any good skeptic will stop at this point and say that this is simply the result of self-suggestion. You get the belief stuck in your head that you’ll see more 11s, so your reticular activating system begins finding them in your environment and bringing them to your conscious attention. There will seem to be more 11s simply because you’re noticing the existing 11s more often. You may be creating some of those 11s unknowingly, and you may also be subconsciously pre-selecting the right numbers to check.

These logical explanations are perfectly fine. They’re nice and neat and tidy. You can certainly claim that I was subconsciously noticing more 11s because that’s what I expected to see. I’m not going to argue that point because it turns out that it doesn’t matter. In fact, I’ll go so far as to concede that point; as it turns out, this is precisely how reality must work if you’re a skeptic.

You see… it’s part of the nature of reality that anything you experience is automatically projected within the framework of your belief system. So if you’re a hard-nosed skeptic, the 11:11 phenomenon must still be validly explainable according to your current beliefs. It cannot violate your beliefs, for that would violate the cosmic principle of free will. The universe cannot show you anything which you’ve intentionally chosen to block from your reality.

Skeptics have plenty of ways to explain my 11:11 experiences, and from the skeptic’s perspective, all of those explanations will seem valid. And indeed, they are valid from within the skeptic’s reference frame. They cannot be otherwise.

That’s one reason why 11:11 is such an interesting phenomenon. Because it works in the realm of improbable but not impossible events (as viewed through an objective lens), it’s able to sneak past the filters that would ordinarily prevent it from reaching your reality at all.

There are many phenomena which an objective belief system will block completely, meaning that there are events in space-time that people with objective beliefs systems will never, ever perceive because their beliefs will block such events 100%. It’s like trying to perceive the color blue while peering through red lenses. However, due to its probabilistic nature, 11:11 is able to get around these filters. Why? Because it always leaves you the out of claiming it was luck, chance, coincidence, or the result of auto-suggestion or hypnosis.

This is why 11:11 is such an insidious doorway. It’s reality’s way of inserting a thought virus through a backdoor into an objective belief system. Once this virus takes root, it begins to dismantle limiting objective beliefs, gradually supplanting them with a more accurate model of reality.

11:11’s purpose is positive, although it may not seem that way when it first takes hold. It’s purpose is ultimately to destroy your belief in a physically grounded objectified reality. This makes it possible for you to discover and perceive more accurate ways of viewing reality.

You can do your best to explain away the surging 11s any way you like. You can cage those experiences in a vault of hard logic. But once you’ve been infected, it’s only a matter of time before your old beliefs begin to crack.

Week after week and month after month, the 11s keep coming. You keep noticing 11:11 on the clock. It’s like you’re being stalked by the number 11 and just can’t shake it. Your logical explanations don’t stop the phenomenon from arising.

Permit yourself a few months, maybe a few years of this, and eventually you’ll reach the point where you’ve had enough. What will you do when five years have passed, and these 11s as well as 11:11 keep popping up all over your environment like a broken record? Will you keep reminding yourself of all the logical reasons such events continue to arise within your otherwise neat and tidy objective universe?

The more you try to disregard and ignore the 11s, the stronger they become. They practically demand your attention.

The 11s are like a pesky ghost that keeps making its presence known. Turning your back on the ghost only makes it more persistent in trying to get your attention. You can deny the ghost’s existence. You can try to explain it away. You can convince yourself that it’s just your imagination and that you’re creating it. Yet no matter how you try to frame it, the ghost persists.

Eventually you’ll break. At some point you’ll turn and face the ghost and ask it what it wants and why it keeps bugging you so incessantly. The sooner you do this, the better.

The Blue Pill vs. the Red Pill

11:11 basically acts like a glitch in the matrix of reality. Explaining it via the reticular activating system may give you some solace at first, but given enough time, that answer will eventually prove unsatisfying.

This leaves you a couple of options.

Option 1 is to conclude that you’re perpetually broken and that you’ve been infected with this stupid mental virus that keeps filtering your reality in a very peculiar way.

Option 2 is to consider that perhaps reality itself doesn’t work the way you previously expected, and maybe — just maybe — these 11s are coming up for a reason that you simply don’t comprehend yet.

Option 1 is the blue pill. Option 2 is the red one.

Most people do their best to stick with the blue pill. They may cling to that pill their entire lives. But many will eventually swallow the red pill and see where it leads.

I took the red pill. And I’d like to give you a glimpse into where it leads.

A Glitch in the Matrix

My initial response to all those 11s was to exclaim, Reality just can’t work this way. It’s simply not possible. But then I asked myself, What if it is possible? And what if there’s some kind of intelligence behind it? What if something else is creating all these 11s in my reality, as a way of trying to get my attention?

The continued recurrence of these 11s serves as a constant wake-up call. The 11s make it difficult to keep doing business as usual. Every time you think you have life figured out, the 11s surge again to remind you that you’re missing something.

Eventually you conclude that your current understanding of reality must in fact be broken. It becomes clear that many of your assumptions about the nature of the universe were wrong. Reality just doesn’t work the way you thought it did. You’re stuck clinging to a broken model, but you don’t yet have anything solid to replace it with.

Losing your grip on reality can be a frustrating experience to say the least. In truth you aren’t losing your grip on reality though. You’re simply letting go of false assumptions. This will have the positive effect of opening your mind to new possibilities.

This will likely be a tumultuous time. You may start to feel disconnected and confused. The best thing you can do is to try to relax and flow with it. I wish I could tell you this process will resolve quickly, but the truth is that it can take years. Part of the problem is that other forces, such as your old social conditioning, will keep pulling you back down, trying to convince you that the old model is still salvageable.

11:11 is a specific frequency of awakening, but there are many others. Some are other recurring number patterns like 111, 1234, or 444. Others are non-numerical events. But the underlying pattern is the same. You experience these events as a repeating glitch in the matrix of reality. When such events occur, they jolt you to a higher level of awareness. You may react with surprise, laughter, or silent recognition as they continue to occur. Eventually you’ll learn to observe such events with gratitude.

Intending to See

When you feel ready, the next step is to ask to see the truth about reality. You have to intend this consciously, or it won’t happen. Say to yourself, I can see that my old model of reality is broken. I now ask to be shown what I’ve been missing. Let me begin to see reality as it truly is. Let my beliefs accurately reflect the true nature of reality.

Form this intention with your thoughts, but feel it as well. You must really want it. You must desire to see the truth about reality as strongly as a drowning man desires his next breath. If you don’t really want to see the truth, nothing will change.

This isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. The truth about reality is very different from what’s taught in mainstream society. It can be very unsettling to see your old notions of reality destroyed, even when you know they’re inaccurate. Most people would rather cling to the familiar than see their lives turned inside-out by such an immense shift in their beliefs.

Unfortunately, this is a journey that must be taken alone. It’s a decision you must make of your own free will. No one can force you into it. 11:11 may crack open the door, but you must willingly choose to walk through it.

There is no point in asking for proof of what lies through this doorway because proof-seeking is an artifact of an objective belief system. This is a choice you must make freely, and proof cannot be provided because that would influence your choice. If you request proof, you will be shown something inconclusive every time. As long as you linger in the doorway, you can never see proof of what lies beyond it. If you were provided such proof, it would violate your freedom to choose your beliefs, and that’s a huge cosmic no-no.

There is a cosmic law which states that your reality must remain congruent with your beliefs. If you choose to maintain your old beliefs, you cannot be shown anything that would violate them. However, once you shed the old beliefs and embrace new ones, the proof you originally sought will be readily forthcoming.

When you consciously ask to see reality accurately, some amazing things will begin to occur, gently at first, then with increasing strength and presence.

Synchronicities

The first change is that you’ll begin to see a surge in synchronicities in your life, more than you’ve even seen before. Highly unlikely coincidences will begin to occur with increasing frequency. This is a gentle way of helping you shed your old beliefs. Instead of immediately destroying your old reality, it begins to crack gradually. This happens by introducing increasingly improbable, but not objectively impossible, events and circumstances into your life.

If you entered through the 11:11 doorway, many of these synchronicities will be connected with the number 11 or the time 11:11, especially in the beginning. At this point you can regard the 11s as sign posts to follow.

For example, whenever you look up and see 11:11 on the clock, take note of the thought you were holding at the moment you noticed the 11:11. The 11:11 is indicating that your thought is aligned with truth. For example, if you were considering an idea, that would be a good and productive idea to act on.

If you look up and see 11:10, it means you’re getting ahead of yourself. The thought you were holding may be good, but the timing isn’t right yet. It would be premature to implement your idea at this time.

If you look up and see 11:12, it means you’re falling behind. The thought you had was good, but the timing is a little late. Other energies related to your idea are already in motion, so you’ll need to move quickly in order to avoid missing the boat.

These synchronicities will begin to serve as a powerful guidance system for you. They act as a two-way communication channel between yourself and the universe.

You aren’t limited to merely using these three times. You can request whatever structures you desire, as long as they’re consistent with your current belief system. If your beliefs are still very objective, then looking up and noticing a particular time is a good signal. It’s one that can fit your belief structure. And you can use it again and again.

However, if you request a signal to see a human being flying through the air as confirmation, that wouldn’t work because your beliefs will usually block that kind of signal.

When you want to open a two-way communication channel with universal intelligence, it’s good to start with simple synchronicities like times on a clock. Think of this as a reasonable baby step. Eventually you’ll be able to enjoy higher bandwidth communication, but simple synchronicities are a good place to start. You may be at this level for several years before you feel comfortable moving beyond it.

At first the synchronicities you experience may seem random and unpredictable, but eventually you’ll be able to create them intentionally. When you hold a strong intention and then release it, the initial reflection will usually occur in the form of synchronicities. Follow that trail wherever it leads.

For example, if you put out the intention to explore a new hobby, like getting into public speaking, and later that same day, a friend invites you to attend a Toastmasters meeting as a guest, and then you notice the time on the clock is 11:11, by all means attend that meeting. This is confirmation that your intention is in the process of manifesting.

11:11 is a doorway (one of many) to a new level of existence. It is the introductory chapter to a greater understanding of reality. Instead of going through life as a hapless victim, 11:11 shows you how to begin creating your reality. There are countless lessons to be learned along the way, far more than I could summarize in a single article (or even a book), but walking through the 11:11 doorway is an amazing step to take.

Final Thoughts

One of the reasons I hesitated to write this article is that it’s likely to be read by a lot of people. Just by reading this article, many of those people will begin to experience the 11:11 phenomenon. Since that is a pretty huge deal, I didn’t want to publicly share anything on this topic until I got a clear indication that the timing was right.

Earlier this year I began to sense that the time to write about 11:11 was drawing near, so I asked for confirmation. While pondering how to write such an article, I looked up at the clock and saw 11:11. Later that day someone emailed me to ask about the 11:11 in the corner of my website (an event that usually happens less than once a month). Then I noticed someone in the forums had started a discussion thread about 11:11. Still on the same day, I got an out-of-the-blue email from someone with 11:11 magazine, a publication I didn’t even know existed. They were interested in having me write an article for them. Nice touch.

I put the article on my active to-do list yesterday, followed by a question mark. The question mark was there as my way of asking, “Are you sure? Is this really the right time to post such an article?” Shortly thereafter the mail arrives, and I receive a sample issue of 11:11 magazine. The cover of the magazine says in bold yellow letters, “Say YES!” Okay! Okay! I’ll write the article already.

If you do start seeing 11:11 all over the place, you’re in for quite a wild ride. For me this journey began 15 years ago, and there’s no end in sight.

I apologize in advance if this ends up breaking your reality. If that happens, you’ll probably want to kill me in a month, question me in a year, and hug me in a decade. I’ll hold out for the hug.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

The first step to change your reality — your experience of reality, that is — is to intend precisely what you want to experience. You do this by imagining it as already real and by getting excited about it. The excitement will draw it into your world. Your excitement can be rooted in fear or love. It will work either way. It’s best to favor one polarity or the other — whichever you feel is more powerful for you — but in truth you can use either frequency.

Aligning your physical self with your new non-physical reality

Once you put out your intention, you must then become a vibrational match for it. First, realize that when you’re excited, your intention has already been received and acknowledged. You don’t even need an alpha reflection because this part is instantaneous. Just know that it works. But the part that seems to take time — and time is part of the illusion you call physical reality — is your becoming a match for your intention. This requires adjusting your frequency (of your lower self or your manifested self) to fit the new reflections you’re creating.

In practice the way you do this varies. My recommendation is for you to sit in quiet meditation for about 20 minutes each day, and imagine yourself already where you want to be. But imagine yourself changing into the kind of person who already has your desires manifested. Feel what he feels. Think what he thinks. Vibrate as he does. Alter the vibrational energy of your lower self to match.

This practice allows your lower self — your physical, manifested being — to enter into the new reality you’ve created with your thoughts. If you don’t align your lower self with your new reality, then you can only access your new reality in your imagination, but you can’t bring your physical body with you. If you want to bring your physical body, you must change its frequency/vibration, so your body becomes compatible with your new reality.

Note that you are not your lower self. Your physical being is just one of your many manifested creations. But it has its own frequency, and that frequency limits its range of experience. Your true self is unlimited, and you’re free to imagine anything you desire. When you imagine something, it becomes real instantaneously. But initially you can only access it non-physically through your non-physical senses. You can feel its presence in your thoughts, but you won’t yet “see” it in your physically perceived reality with your physical senses. The reason is that you haven’t yet taken your body with you, and your body includes your physical senses. Your physical senses remain at their old frequency (the last frequency you adjusted them to), so they can only continue feeding you sensory information that falls within their frequency range.

In practice this means you may detect some change in your physical reality, which you might refer to as an alpha reflection. A more accurate term would be an alpha projection. What you are experiencing is the projection of the new, non-physical reality you just created onto the frequency range of your physically perceived reality. Depending on the current sensory range of your physical being (based on its vibrational frequency), you may perceive virtually no physical change at all, or you may perceive a great deal of change very quickly.

The role of time

Time is one of the perceptual factors of your physical self. You may cast out a new intention, and it immediately manifests in the non-physical frequency range. However, your physical self perceives the manifestation as occurring hours, days, or weeks later — or perhaps never. This is because time itself is part of the projection of input that your physical self perceives. What makes time appear real is trying to filter reality through your physical being’s sense perceptions. You aren’t perceiving reality itself; you’re perceiving a projection of reality into a time-bound perceptual matrix.

Imagine a human baby. The baby has no sense of time. It is fully in the present moment. It has no patience. When it’s hungry it cries for food. It has no sense that food is coming later. It only perceives the now. But as that baby adjusts the frequency range of its senses to match the physical reality of the earth plane, its senses align themselves with being able to perceive reality through the lens — the projection — of linear time. Time, therefore, is an artifact of your physical senses. Disconnect yourself from your physical senses, and time no longer has meaning. There is no way to measure time without access to your physical senses. Even if you count numbers in your mind, all you have is the current count, your present-moment memories of the “past,” and your present-moment projection of the “future.” Both past and future are present-moment projections, but they are not real in the sense of having a position in space-time.

The notion of using numbers (i.e. time units) as a measure of temporal distance is strictly rooted to your physical sense perceptions — outside of those physical senses, time is strictly an imaginary concept. Time is irrelevant in a universe of pure consciousness devoid of physicality.

Tuning in to your non-physical senses

How limited is the sensory range of your physical being? Can you train your eyes and ears to perceive a broader range of frequencies? To some degree the answer is yes, but those frequencies must be in some way compatible with physicality. There must be a way to project the non-physical frequencies you wish to perceive onto the physical plane. That isn’t always possible. You can use devices like radios to turn non-physical frequencies into physically perceivable projections. Electromagnetic frequencies can be translated into sound waves. But you cannot use a radio to listen to the frequency of love, which is also a non-physical frequency. If you try to project love into a sound, it’s like trying to squeeze a whale through the eye of a needle. What comes out the other side won’t remotely resemble a whale, although it will still consist of whale parts. The projection matrix of physicality is simply inadequate to the task of representing the full range of non-physical frequencies as physical sense perceptions. Only some non-physical frequencies can be projected onto physicality without excessive loss of information.

Fortunately you are much more than a physical being. Your physical self and your physical sense projections are merely equipment that you have access to. Don’t make the mistake of thinking they are you. That would be like listening to the radio and thinking that the device is equal to your ear. Your physical senses are merely frequency translators with a limited operating range. There is a great deal they cannot accurately detect. If the only input you consider is that which can be projected through your physical senses, you are practically senseless.

In order to detect a broader range of frequencies, you must tune out from your physical senses and tune into your non-physical senses. The best way to do this is to physically relax your body and eliminate as much physical sensory input as you can. Close your eyes, quiet the environment, go to a place where the smell is neutral and the temperature comfortable. Breathe deeply for a while until your sense of touch becomes numb. This will happen automatically if you remain still and allow the repetitive, non-changing input to saturate your physical nerves. With practice you should be able to enter this state very quickly, within minutes. Again, the sense of time passing is merely part of the physical sensory projection matrix. Once you disconnect from your physical senses completely, you will no longer perceive the passage of time (except to the degree that you continue to associate with your physical senses and translate your non-physical experience into a physical sensory equivalent).

Once you’ve turned your attention away from your physical senses, you can begin listening to your non-physical senses. Try not to sense anything at all in your physical body. Remember that you’re a conscious being and that your body is merely a tool, much like a radio. If you want to perceive frequencies the radio cannot detect, you must turn the radio off and put it down for a while. If you try to watch TV and listen to the radio at the same time, it will be very difficult to hear the TV. Similarly, if you want to perceive reality through your non-physical senses clearly, it’s easiest if you tune out from your physical senses.

How do you “listen” to your non-physical senses? First, realize that this form of listening is an activity. If you tune out from your physical senses but don’t subsequently open your non-physical senses, you may remain tuned out from all sensory input and perceive nothing at all. You may perceive this to be a pleasant state for a while, but you’ll eventually want to move past it and start listening to other frequencies that are available to you.

Let’s explore some of your non-physical senses.

Intuition

One of your most basic, primitive non-physical senses is your intuition. This is the easiest to access even while you’re still associating with your physical senses because it’s essentially the “loudest” non-physical frequency. Even so, it is far more subtle than the grosser physical frequencies. To access your intuition, simply intend to perceive your intuition channel once you’ve turned off your physical senses. Since you’re already so accustomed to physical sensory forms, it’s a virtual certainty that you’ll project your intuitive channel into mental imagery, sounds, and emotions. With practice, however, you can overcome this limitation and learn to perceive a broader range of intuitive information. You will eventually learn to distinguish your intuition channel from your imagination and your emotions, just as an infant learns to distinguish the separate input channels of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

Think of your intuition as a broad-range antenna that you’re holding out into the non-physical universe. It picks up the strongest signals that broadcast loudly. Through your intuition you can perceive the strongest non-physical energy patterns. Many of these will already be in physical form and will be familiar to you. For example, you can perceive strong energies from other people in your life, strong energies in the world at large such as war and violence and love and joy, and strong energies within your own non-physical self like a sense of compassion or a feeling of power.

Your intuition can sense and interpret a broad range of frequencies. It is very flexible. You can mentally request information on any subject, and if there are strong frequencies present, your intuitive antenna will pick them up and translate them into some kind of inner sensory experience. Usually this will be projected into dream-like imagery, sounds, and feelings, but again, with practice your inner perceptions needn’t be limited to their physical equivalents.

The best way to develop your intuition is practice, practice, practice. Keep tuning in and listening to this channel. The more you do this, the more your intuition will self-calibrate for greater clarity and accuracy. Of course the less you use your intuition, the more its calibration will drift. Don’t expect your intuition to be accurate and reliable if you hardly ever pay attention to it.

Telepathy

Another non-physical sense you can tune into is telepathy. By listening and broadcasting thoughts on the right frequency (controlled by your intentions), you can communicate with non-physical beings. This includes communicating with the non-physical parts of any human beings you perceive with your physical senses.

One caution is that telepathic information is most accurate when it remains in non-physical form. Once you start mixing non-physical telepathic communication with physical sensory communication, don’t expect the two to convey the same information. That would be like expecting your radio and your television to broadcast the same information. Sometimes different devices will pick up information that sounds similar, but it’s never exactly the same.

More often than not, your non-physical telepathic perceptions will be very different from your physical sensory communication (with your eyes, ears, and mouth). Physical communication is limited to a very narrow band of frequencies and loses tremendous accuracy when you try to communicate non-physical ideas. Non-physical communication, however, has much more bandwidth.

For example, suppose you telepathically channel information from a non-physical entity, and then you put it in written form to share with other people. The information may have seemed crystal clear to you when you perceived it non-physically. But when you share that text in physical form, and other people read it through their physical senses, much of the meaning will be “lost in translation.” However, if the text serves as a “station identifier” that allows other people to telepathically connect with the same non-physical communication channel that you used, they’ll be able to pick up the information much more accurately through their non-physical senses than they will by trying to analyze the text itself.

Imagine that you see Niagara Falls, and you want to share it with a friend. If you simply show her a photograph you took, the ineffable quality of your experience will not be shared. To get close to your experience, you would have to physically take her to Niagara Falls, so she could experience the same frequencies you did. When you compress those frequencies to a photograph, you lose too many channels of sensory input.

Desire

The third and final non-physical communication frequency we’ll cover here is desire. Intuition is similar to looking around with your eyes. Telepathy is like using your mouth and ears to communicate. Desire is the non-physical equivalent to physical movement and action. Desire is a creative channel.

When you create something non-physically by desiring it, it manifests immediately in non-physical form. If you wish to imagine an apple, you need only hold the desire, and the non-physical apple is immediately created. You can non-physically perceive its presence by sensing its energy through your intuitive channel. You may even visualize it, but visualization isn’t necessary. All it takes to create a non-physical apple is to desire to create it, and it is done.

If you are in the presence of other non-physical beings, they can share in your creations instantly. If you create an apple in your imagination right now, I can perceive it with you. If I create something non-physical and you are listening with your intuition and/or telepathy to the frequency output of my desire, you will perceive what I create as well. In this manner I can share ideas or experiences with you instantly and immediately.

However, it is much more difficult for the desire channel to be perceived through your physical senses in the physical universe. Your desires manifest instantly in non-physical form, but your physical senses will rarely be able to perceive those changes immediately. For starters your physical senses are limited by the projection of time, so even though your non-physical desire manifests immediately, your physical senses will at best only pick up a slight energetic shift in the direction of your desire as your senses adjust themselves to perceive the new frequencies you’ve created. It’s as if your desires have immediately manifested behind you, but in order for you to see them in physical form, you must turn your head.

In truth whenever you physically perceive a manifestation of your desires, you’re perceiving the projection of the non-physical desire.

Focus on creating non-physical manifestations. Don’t try to manifest physical projections. This is a key distinction. What you truly want is never physical in nature. Your truest, deepest desires are always in the non-physical frequency range. For example, wanting money, sex, or a stronger physical body are false desires because they’re merely projections of the non-physical. You never actually desire a projection, so when you try to manifest physical forms directly, your intention will always be weak. It’s like trying to satisfy your appetite with a photo of a banana instead of a real banana. You may be able to do it, but the banana photo cannot satisfy you in any meaningful sense, no matter how delicious it may look. The whole attempt will probably frustrate you, and in the end you’ll only be hungrier.

Instead of money what you really want to experience is abundance, gratitude, and variety. Instead of sex you want to experience love, connection, pleasure, and communion with other conscious beings. Instead of a strong body, you want to experience radiance, confidence, and power. You can manifest all of those desires in non-physical form right now.

Whatever you think you desire in physical form, look to the real non-physical desire behind it. Then put all your energy into creating and manifesting your non-physical desires since that’s what you truly want. Eventually your physical senses will catch up, and you’ll soon see those desires projected into physical form. But it won’t be the physical form that satisfies you. The deeper meaning is always carried by the non-physical frequencies.

Never intend anything physical. Always intend the non-physical, and allow the physical projection to take care of itself.

There are other non-physical perceptual channels such as dreams, but intuition, telepathy, and desire are the easiest to access consciously.

Why does reality work this way? What’s the point?

The reason you chose to experience life as a physical being is so you can have the experience of growth. You wanted to experience reality as a progressive continuum, so you could explore the gaps between your thoughts. These gaps cannot be visited in non-physical reality, so you have to come into the physical frequency range to delve into them. You need the concept of linear time to help you explore these gaps.

In strictly non-physical frequencies, there is no growth, no sense of change occurring over time. Every thought projects itself instantly. Reality doesn’t glide smoothly from one moment to the next; it frequently jumps around. Simply hold a thought and it becomes real. There is no sense of progression from one reality to the next. Since your thoughts can jump around randomly, your reality jumps as well.

Enforcing a sense of continuity in purely non-physical frequencies is effectively impossible. Can you hold your thoughts in a continuous stream of logical progression, where there are no discontinuities, no jumps out of sequence? You probably can’t even do this for five minutes.

In truth there are multiple frequency ranges where continuity can be enforced. The physical universe is just one of them.

The reason you find yourself projected into the physical frequency range is specifically to experience time. Time allows you to witness a progressive unfolding from one physical reality to the next. Physical reality is always playing catch-up with your strongest thoughts. If you hold strong, consistent thoughts, your physical reality will soon reflect those thoughts. If, however, your thoughts jump around wildly and inconsistently, your physical reality will keep changing directions too.

Leading your reality

Imagine that physical reality is your pet dog. Suppose that the dog has a position on some kind of virtual map, where every spot on the map represents a present-moment physical reality you could be experiencing. So the dog’s position corresponds to your present-moment experience of physical reality. When the dog moves, your physical reality changes. For example, if your dog moves from a position labeled scarcity to a position labeled abundance, in your physical reality you’ll see yourself becoming wealthier as the dog moves.

Whenever you hold a strong thought, you call your dog to you: “Here, boy!” Your dog then starts running toward you. But if you jump to a different thought before your dog reaches you, it’s like teleporting to a new location and calling, “Here, boy!” again. Now your dog switches directions and starts running toward you once again. If you keep jumping around wildly, calling your dog from different spots, your dog’s trajectory will appear chaotic and random. However, if you stand in one spot and keep calling your dog from the same location, he’ll run straight to you.

In the non-physical frequency ranges, when you call your dog, he appears at your side instantly. Your desires manifest instantly. This may seem like a nice experience to have, and it surely is, but the downside is that you can never explore the gaps between your desires. If you want to experience a particular reality, you must intend it precisely. You cannot explore the potential realities that lie within the gaps between your thoughts. So your own imagination actually limits what experiences you can have. If you can’t imagine it, you can’t experience it.

The wonderful benefit of physical reality is that you can get your dog to run through areas you’ve never visited, places you couldn’t even imagine. This means you can experience realities you cannot even imagine. This is an enormously powerful, consciousness-raising, imagination-expanding experience for any non-physical being to have. Consequently, the physical universe is an immensely popular frequency range to visit.

What you may have forgotten is that your dog is always responding to your calls. If you forget this, you may start chasing your dog instead of calling your dog to you. You may even blame your dog for leading you to an undesirable location (such as poverty, loneliness, an unfulfilling job, poor health, etc). But you can’t blame your dog for this. Even so, this is actually a perfectly valid way to live. Some beings who come here will decide, “I’m fine letting the dog run wild for a while.” You can still learn a lot this way because the dog will visit places you’ve never been to.

Your physical senses may tell you, “This is an unpleasant reality to experience.” But at the same time, your non-physical self is sensing, “This is a reality I’ve never experienced before. I am learning so much from it. I couldn’t even imagine something like this if I tried.”

If you want to change your experience of physical reality, you must lead your dog. It will faithfully follow you. But you must consistently intend a new position and allow your dog to come to you. Hold your intentions clearly, and allow your physical reality to gradually catch up. If you keep revisiting your dog’s location to check on it (i.e. by reacting to reality instead of consciously creating it), you are meeting your dog and tell him, “Stop!” Whenever you do this, your reality will stagnate. This is fine if you want to soak up a certain experience for a while, but if you wish to continue growing, you must take charge and lead your dog where you want to go.

* * *

There is no “wrong” way to experience physical reality. You will learn a lot whether you actively take charge of the experience or passively allow it to unfold. But if you find your current physical reality unpleasant or if you’ve been stuck in a certain location longer than you’d like, realize that this is happening because you’re holding your physical body and physical senses there with your own thoughts. You are calling your dog to this spot again and again. Your dog is very obedient, so he will not leave you. If you want to experience something new, then you must first create it in your imagination and hold those thoughts long enough for your dog to catch up.

As you do this, allow yourself to fully experience the unfolding pathway from one physical reality to the next. After all, this is why you’re here.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Several people have asked if I’m still able to connect with my recently departed friend Ron who died in a car accident on August 14th. The answer is yes. He’s been hanging around often. The connection is so strong that I don’t have to meditate or anything. I just think of him and can instantly converse with him. I’ve never experienced such a strong connection before.

I’ve also been in contact with two other friends who’ve been sensing Ron’s presence around them. I’m not going to share their stories publicly, so I’ll just say that this whole thing has been rather fascinating.

While I’ve often connected with non-physical entities over the past several years (I was deep into it in 2002 and 2003), this is the first time I’ve had such a strong connection with someone I already knew as a human being, let alone someone I can trust and who has a communication style I’m already familiar with. That’s a rare opportunity, so I wanted to use it to learn more about the other side. Ron was a very logical, left-brained guy, so I figured if anyone could tell me what was going on over there and try some interesting experiments, he’d be the one to do it.

In his living life, I’d have never pegged Ron as the type of guy who’d be able to communicate so clearly and crisply from the other side. After all he was a Republican… hehehe. He was a very generous, giving guy, so maybe his giving nature somehow bestowed him more power on the other side. His energy comes through very strong and upbeat now, so he’s well past the initial shock of being dead.

Blackjack revisited

Due to what was basically an “accident,” I did a re-test of the blackjack experience with Ron last Thursday morning. Same casino as before. If you can’t handle weird, don’t read this.

As I wrote in a previous article, in our first field test, we won $580 in 90 minutes. All of that money was donated to the Ralph C. Smedley Memorial Fund to help support Toastmasters International, a non-profit organization.

On Thursday morning I was driving to the gym as usual, but I got distracted and made a wrong turn by mistake. There’s a lot of road construction near our house right now (building a new freeway overpass), so I have to take a detour for certain trips (like picking up the kids from summer school) but not for others (like going to the gym). I went the detour route by mistake, which was okay because it still sent me in the general direction of the gym, but it also meant I’d be driving right past the casino.

While driving I began to notice how sore I was feeling. I’m sore because I changed up my exercise routine recently. So I decided it would be better to take a walk and allow a little more recovery time instead of doing another gym workout. The casino is an okay place to walk indoors– even early in the morning it’s pretty hot outside in Vegas — so I parked and went inside. This early in the morning (just after dawn), the place is pretty much deserted.

As soon as I walk in the door of the billion-dollar structure, Ron shows up and suggests we try the blackjack thing again. I didn’t really want to play, so I just put him off with a noncommittal maybe. I said I wanted to walk a bit first, and then after that we’ll see.

I walked about two minutes, and Ron comes back again and insists, “Let’s play now. There’s a good table available.” My curiosity gets the better of me, so I acquiesce and head towards the tables.

I notice two blackjack tables open. There are lots of tables but most are closed this early in the day. The first table is under a cloud of smoke from the smokers that are playing, so I cash in for $200 at the second table and push out my $10 bet.

The table is only half full, and I sense that the energy of the other players seems a bit down. A little chit chat reveals they’ve been losing.

Then one of the other players lights up a cigarette. Since I normally avoid playing with smokers, I’m about to get up and leave, but Ron insists, “Stay put.” Ron was a non-smoker too by the way. Fortunately the smoke drifts away in the opposite direction and doesn’t bother me.

My fate is no different than the other players. The hands I’m dealt are total garbage… virtually nothing but 13s, 14s, 15s, and 16s. I bust most of them, and even when I don’t bust, the dealer is hitting 20s and 21s.

After losing 5 hands in a row, I’m about to give it up and leave, but Ron keeps repeating, “Don’t worry.” He says it will turn around. Then he adds half-jokingly, “Well, maybe not this shoe!”

My $200 dwindles to $80 within the first 15 minutes at the table.

I notice that every time I started to worry that things are going downhill, Ron pops in and says, “Don’t worry.” I felt he was hinting that my own energy was making it harder for him to help… that my attachment was practically generating a field of bad luck. I worked on raising my energy and becoming more detached. That wasn’t too difficult because at this level of betting, the money doesn’t mean anything to me, but I still prefer winning to losing. I began to feel better about losing, but the cards were still bad.

We finally reach the end of the shoe, so it’s time for a shuffle. The girl next to me cuts the deck. She gets dealt an instant blackjack while I get a 20 and win too. Then I get a blackjack on the following hand and win again. After that my hands are coming up all roses, and I’m scoring some nice splits and double downs. I start to win for a while, clawing my way back to the $200 I started with.

Now this is where it gets weird.

I’m sitting at the table with a plastic water bottle that I was going to take to the gym. At some point I realize that the water bottle is labeled with the name of the mortuary where I attended Ron’s service — that’s where I happened to pick up this bottle a few days earlier. I start becoming very self-conscious. I really don’t want to get into a conversation about why I have a mortuary-branded water bottle in a casino. I surreptitiously slide the bottle off the table and into my pocket. (I’m wearing athletic shorts with deep pockets.)

At this point everything seems to stagnate. Now I’m just trading hands. Every time I start to pull ahead a little, I lose a double down or split and drop below $200 again. I’m mostly bobbling around between $170 and $230… getting nowhere.

Then Ron says to me, “Put the water bottle back on the table. It makes it easier for me to see.”

Huh? What kind of insanity is that?

But I give him the benefit of the doubt and return the bottle to the table. I figure that since everything is energy, maybe he has some kind of energetic connection to the bottle because it was pretty much bathed in his energy at the memorial service where I got it.

And wouldn’t you know it? As soon as I return the bottle to the table, I start winning again — fast. The other players at the table all start winning too because the dealer is busting most of her hands. I can feel the energy of the whole table rising.

The woman next to me is landing so many splits, double downs, and blackjacks that she turns $100 into $500+. We both ham it up and start high-fiving each other with every big win. She starts calling the cards that come up with amazing accuracy. It was pretty insane. I probably could have kept going, but I needed to get home, so I cashed out at the end of the shoe with $415, for a net win of $215. I only played about 40 minutes total.

That brings the total win to $795 from about 130 minutes of play with Ron’s assistance.

As I returned to my car, Ron expressed how much he enjoyed this. He acted as if I’d done him some kind of favor, like I was pitching balls to him for batting practice.

Feeling drained

By the end of last week, I began feeling really strange. Physically I felt okay, but I felt like I lost all interest in life. I became totally lazy and unmotivated. I could barely motivate myself to eat — everything seemed way too effortful. I just wanted to sit on the couch and read. That was about all I did on Saturday.

I thought maybe I needed some extra rest, so I tried to take a nap. I lay down for an hour but couldn’t sleep at all. I wasn’t sleepy. I felt like I’d lost all interest in life. I can’t say I felt depressed. I just felt totally empty.

Partly I wanted to go out on Saturday night, figuring that being around other people would help restore my energy and enthusiasm. But I let those plans slide. I thought, “Eh… why bother?” I was totally apathetic. The only thing I felt like doing was absolutely nothing.

Erin noticed that something seemed off with me, so we sat down and talked about it. She suggested that maybe Ron was feeding off my energy to stay grounded to the physical plane. Eventually it drained me dry. That made sense to me because I felt like my spirit had been sucked dry, even though my body felt okay.

I realized this draining didn’t happen suddenly. It came on gradually ever since I started connecting with Ron after he died. As the week progressed, I began feeling more and more disconnected and apathetic about my life.

We did some energy work to help me disconnect from Ron and to encourage him to find another energy source. The details would be too much to insert into this article, but perhaps Erin or I can explore that at another time.

I gradually started feeling better within 24 hours, but I also lost the ability to connect with Ron as clearly as I could before. He seemed more distant, and the messages were coming through very fuzzy. I couldn’t lock in on his signal. It got harder to tell if I was getting a real communication from him or if I was stuck in my imagination or just picking up background interference. Before this energy work, he was always coming through strong and clear. If the signal strength was a 10 before, now it was down to about a 4.

Yet another blackjack trial

Last night I decided to pop down to the Strip to give the blackjack test another run. I brought the mortuary water bottle with me just in case it helped. My connection with Ron wasn’t feeling that strong, but I asked if he wanted to have another go at gaming together, and it seemed like he said okay. However, I wasn’t feeling it the same way I was before. I couldn’t hear him as well, and I was getting fuzzy and conflicting messages running through my mind. There was a lot of interference. I played blackjack at the Sahara and lost $135 in 20 minutes. I was able to remain upbeat and detached, but I could feel the connection just wasn’t there like it was before.

While walking down the Strip afterwards, I pondered that maybe Ron needed to connect with my energy to make this work. So I took a risk and told him that he could feed off my energy just for tonight in order to make his work, but after that we’d have to disconnect and let me recharge. I can’t say this was a wise idea, but I was too curious not to try it.

At that point he actually started coming through more clearly, but the signal still seemed weaker than before. It was maybe a 6 on a 1-10 scale. But at least I was feeling better about life and my motivation and enthusiasm had returned.

I popped into the Riviera, found a good blackjack table, and started playing. Ron complained that the continuous automatic shuffling machines were harder for him to work with. He said it was easier for him if the dealer hand-shuffled the decks. He said he would still try, but he couldn’t guarantee anything. I played 20 minutes and won $50. Better… but still down $85 for the night.

My final stop was Treasure Island. More automatic shuffling machines. The conditions were nice though — a friendly dealer and happy-go-lucky 20-something players who were in town for a conference. I coached them on how to play their hands while they downed as many free drinks as they could manage. They still made numerous errors and didn’t win, but at least I helped them make their money last longer, and we all had a little too much fun high-fiving on the big wins. My best hand was when I split 8s four times and won the quad bet when the dealer busted. I played for an hour and 40 minutes and won $125.

I always find it fascinating that people who are new to blackjack almost always play too conservatively. They give an edge to the house largely because they fail to take advantage of all the opportunities for doubling down and splitting. They feel good about winning a single bet, not realizing they could have won double, triple, or more if they played more aggressively. I previously wrote about this in the article Life Lessons from Blackjack. It’s such a great metaphor for how people live their lives. People cling to their small gains, not realizing the bigger opportunities they missed because they settled for less than they could have gotten. When the odds are 60% that you’ll win the hand, you want to push more chips out when you can. Missing such opportunities should be seen as a loss, not a lesser win.

My evening trial ended with a small net win of $40, bringing our total winning streak to $835. I thanked Ron for his help and disconnected from his energy. I didn’t feel energetically drained, but I was tired from being up later than usual. Even after midnight it was still hot outside as I walked back to my car.

Today I feel really good and super happy. My energy and enthusiasm are back up again. I’m going to have to be careful when doing so much connecting with the other side though. I was lucky that Erin was able to help me diagnose this problem.

No card counting

There’s one important fact I forgot to mention earlier. In all of these blackjack experiments with Ron, I was NOT counting cards, even though I know how. I was varying my bets a little, but those variations had nothing to do with the count because I wasn’t tracking the count. I played every hand according to the same basic strategy you’ll find in any off-the-shelf blackjack book.

Why didn’t I count cards? The honest answer is that it wasn’t worth the effort for the low limits I was betting and the very low frequency with which I play. I used to do a lot of card counting when I was in my early 20s, but I didn’t want to make a career out of blackjack. If I play today, it’s more for socialization and fun than because I’m trying to win money. I’d rather relax and chat openly with the dealer and the other players instead of doing mental gymnastics in my head. Card counting can be very mentally draining. After a few hours of it, my brain is mush.

So skill-wise I wasn’t bringing any special edge with me. The edge should have belonged to the house. But that didn’t seem to bother Ron.

Is this spiritually legal?

These experiences were rather surprising to me. First, I don’t know why the heck Ron seems to like blackjack, since I don’t recall him ever expressing interest in casino gambling. I asked him about that last week (while we were still strongly connected), and he basically said he’s trying to practice affecting the physical universe from the other side. Fair enough. I can imagine that if I were a spirit trying to influence the physical world, I might also start with games of chance, since it allows for a lot of repetitive practice, and the outcome is measurable. You can also publicly affect reality without overriding anyone’s free will, since skeptics still retain the freedom to dismiss such events as luck or chance; they can also assume you’re lying if they weren’t an eye witness.

As it turns out, maintaining consistency with the skeptics’ version of reality is pretty important. According to Ron, it is NOT spiritually permitted to override a skeptic’s freedom to choose their beliefs; in practice this means that skeptics always have to have an out. Either they can’t be there to see what would shock them, or they have to be able to dismiss such reports as false, exaggerated, pure luck, etc. A skeptic cannot be shown proof of what they doubt.

During our first blackjack test, Ron and I were playing for charity, but for these last two trials, it was understood that I was just playing for myself. Partly I wanted to know if this would still work if I was playing for individual gain. I was very curious about that. The limits I was betting weren’t going to make a serious dent in my finances or the casinos’, but still — if Ron is doing something from the other side to help me win, doesn’t that break some kind of spiritual rule?

So I asked him, “Ron, shouldn’t this be spiritually illegal or something? Doesn’t it violate some kind of ethereal law to do this sort of thing? Playing for charity is one thing, but should you really be helping me win extra cash for myself? Is this going to come back to bite us later?”

His answer actually made me laugh. He said, “Don’t worry. I can see that you have karma points to spare.” Then he showed me what looked like an energy meter that revealed a full positive karma supply. He suggested that I’d earned a lot of positive karma because of the work I’ve done with my blog. He seemed to be half-joking as he said this, as if he found my original question amusing.

To my recollection that was the first time he communicated visually with me since he crossed over. Apparently he’s gaining new skills.

In some follow-up exchange (also last week while we had a strong connection going), Ron shared the opinion that what we did was mostly okay because my intention was to help him and to satisfy my curiosity, not because I really wanted/needed the money. Ron suggested that if my intention had been the latter, this wouldn’t have worked… or if we found a way to make it work, it would have incurred some kind of karmic debt for both of us. Hmmm…

As I looked back, I realized he was right about my intentions. I really wasn’t focused on winning money. Even when I was losing, I was more concerned that Ron might be failing in his efforts. Ron implied that my lack of attachment to the money was very important.

Imagine if you ran a similar test by playing one-penny blackjack, limiting your buy-in to 20 cents total. Hopefully this amount of money won’t make or break you, so you can detach from worrying about the financial impact and just play for fun and curiosity. That’s how I felt about the amount I was risking. Win or lose, it’s not going to impact me either way.

Ron’s answer makes sense to me. If we could all get rich by enlisting non-physical entities to help us win at gambling, there wouldn’t be any gambling because the casinos would go broke. It seems like that would also defeat the purpose of living in a reality where money is used as a medium of exchange. So however this works from a spiritual perspective, it has to be consistent with what we’re already experiencing. Even so, it sounds like those rules have some flexibility, although there may be unforeseen negative consequences to pushing the boundaries. It felt okay to do this as a short-run experiment, but it wouldn’t feel right to me to do this with a long-term profit motivation.

The role of polarity

I asked Ron what role polarity plays in this (still last week while we were strongly connected). He said that since we’re both on the same side intention-wise, we can work together on cross-bridging experiments like we just did, but it’s still not easy because we now exist primarily in different frequency ranges, so we must both stretch in order to communicate. This can drain us both if we don’t disconnect and recharge now and then.

Ron said that he doesn’t really know what the darkworker side can do because he hasn’t looked into it. He did tell me, however, that he can’t do anything that would interfere with human free will, mainly because the nature of reality prevents it. He was able to connect with me because I invited him to and because I’m already open to such experiences. If I didn’t believe we could connect, he wouldn’t have been able to come through at all because that would have violated my freedom to choose my beliefs. We talked extensively about free will, so I may have to write a follow-up article on that topic. It’s quite fascinating.

Please take note that I’m just sharing my experiences as they come. I’m not trying to convince you of anything here. You’ll surely filter my reports through your own belief lenses, and that’s fine. I totally understand if these kinds of stories are too much for some people to handle. I’d never have believed this myself 20 years ago, so if you don’t believe me or if you think I’m making this up, I can’t fault you for that. I respect your ability to choose your beliefs, regardless of how that impacts our ongoing relationship.

Please also be aware that I’m committed to sharing my growth experiences as they occur, so if you ask me to stop writing on such topics simply because these ideas conflict with your current understanding of reality, I have to decline because otherwise I’d be holding back way too much. As I see it, if you and I agree on absolutely everything, we can’t help each other grow. It’s only by exploring our differences that we can learn from each other.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

On Sunday Erin and I attended Ron’s memorial service followed by a reception attended by his family, friends, and many other Las Vegas Toastmasters. I probably knew about half the people there.

Since Ron had such a deep and lasting impact on me, much more than he probably realized, I wanted to share some of what I learned from him, partly as a way of expressing my gratitude for the man that he was, and partly because I think it may inspire you to rethink a few things about your own life.

Mentor, coach, and friend

Ron was an incredible mentor and coach to many people. He was a DTM in Toastmasters International (the highest rank one can achieve) and was Toastmasters’ District 33 Mentor of the Year. He has attended and judged more speech contests than anyone I know. Just last weekend he shared his advice at a free workshop to help local speakers improve their performance in speech contests. Because he was so generous in giving of himself, he touched a lot of people’s lives, including mine.

I first met Ron in October 2004, just a few weeks after I started blogging. Ron came up to me after my first Division-level humorous speech contest (where I finished in 2nd place) and told me that he thought I showed great potential as a speaker and that I should consider joining an advanced Toastmasters club, a club that would challenge me more than my current club. I’d only been in Toastmasters for 4 months at that point, so I didn’t feel ready to join an advanced club.

I didn’t even meet all the prerequisites to join the club he recommended — I had to complete 10 Toastmasters speeches first, and I was only up to 6 so far. But Ron was pretty convincing, so I took his advice and attended a few meetings as a guest. I admit it was a bit intimidating at first because the other speakers were so much better than me — so smooth and flowing even when speaking off the cuff. I clearly remember what Ron said to me though: “It’s always good to join groups where you just barely qualify for membership. You’ll improve a lot faster that way because the other people will help lift you up to a new level.”

I realized he was right, so I joined that club as soon as I was qualified to do so, which happened in April 2005. What an amazing journey that has been! I learned much more from this advanced club than I would have learned if I stuck with the easier, safer path. I’m still a member of that club today, which has since become one of the most successful clubs in Vegas with about 35 members. In fact, Erin is being inducted as our newest member tonight.

In March 2005 I actually wrote a blog entry mentioning Ron’s advice. At the time I used to tease him that because of that blog post, I ranked #1 on his name on Google, so according to Google, I owned him. He seemed to find that amusing.

Having worked many years as a stock analyst on Wall Street, Ron was a great strategic thinker. He was able to look at a speech and make many suggestions for improvement, even though he wasn’t a top contest competitor himself. I can’t even count all the people who owe him a debt of gratitude for his help over the years.

In 2005, about a year after we first met, Ron and I and some local friends attended a seminar on the Vegas Strip. Erin was out of town with the kids (and our only car), so Ron offered to give me a ride. When I got in the car, he said he wanted to pick my brain about blogging, which was a nice exchange because I wanted to pick his brain about speaking and speech contests. There was a lot of traffic that day, so we were a little late arriving, but I didn’t mind because he was such a great person to talk to. He was immensely curious and was always thinking about how certain things could be improved — especially people.

Ron was always reading books, listening to CDs, and watching DVDs about communication and presentation skills. Whenever I went to a local speaking or presentation skills workshop, he was there. But instead of applying what he learned for his own use, Ron quickly turned around and passed on the best ideas he encountered to help coach others to improve. He had a great memory and often shared ideas and anecdotes from the vast amounts of information he absorbed. Most of the information products I have on speaking and communication skills were originally recommended by Ron. A glance at my bookshelf triggers memories of many conversations with him.

Ron encouraged me to continue competing in speech contests, saying that it was the fastest way to improve, equivalent to years of regular Toastmasters’ club attendance. Since then I’ve competed in three different contest seasons and learned a great deal from them. Following his advice required more courage, but it was a lot more effective. He helped me shave years off my learning curve. Ron did this for a lot of people.

There are many people who will help coach you up to their level, but what was so special about Ron is that he coached people beyond his level. How many of us can say that we’d willingly coach someone to surpass us? It was noted at yesterday’s service that Ron was a rare man with “the biggest intellect paired with the smallest ego.” I completely agree.

Ron was very encouraging of others, but he truthfully told people what they needed to hear. He didn’t let you squeak by when it was obvious you were performing below your potential. At the same time, he knew when it was best to be gentle with new speakers.

I think Ron approached coaching and mentoring with the mindset of an investor. Just as he once analyzed companies on Wall Street, he learned to recognize mediocre speakers who could eventually become great speakers if he invested some of his time and energy to help them. Ron was good at recognizing speakers who had heart (something he really couldn’t teach), and then he helped teach them the head-oriented stuff they needed to succeed. I imagine it’s a similar skill to recognizing a startup company with lots of raw passion and talent, a company that could do really well with the right mentoring and management.

As Ron witnessed my unfolding success as a blogger, he developed an interest in blogging as well. He attended my local blogging workshops and asked me a lot of follow-up questions. I think he was attracted to the idea of sharing his strategic business knowledge with more people. It took him a while, but he finally got his WordPress blog online at RonLewison.com and posted some of his articles shortly before he died. He had some trouble with the fonts because he pasted his articles from MS-Word — a common issue for new bloggers — but at least he got it up and running.

I’m not sure if Ron fully realized what a tremendous positive rippling effect he had on others. He was a very mental/analytical guy to be sure, but his actions affected people a lot more deeply than that. When Ron offered detailed advice and coaching, he came at it from the analysis side, probably because that was his background. However, I know that the people he coached, myself included, actually perceived Ron’s help as if he was saying, “I believe in you.” I have no doubt that he really cared about people.

Connecting after death

Now if you happen to maintain a belief system in which you’ve concluded that communication with the other side is impossible, you may want to skip this next section. On the other hand, if you’re of a more open-minded nature, I hope you’ll keep reading. I won’t be offended if you choose to skip it though since I know that death can be a sensitive subject for many people.

Partly because of my sensitivity to such things as well as the path Erin and I have shared for many years, after I learned of Ron’s death, I wondered if I would sense his presence or be able to connect with him in some way. Well, that happened in a most powerful way. I wasn’t too surprised that it happened since I always felt good about Ron while he was alive. I just didn’t think it would happen so soon.

On Friday (the day after Ron died), I took a 20-minute nap. I usually don’t take daytime naps, but I was out late meeting with someone the previous night, so I started getting drowsy and decided to take a short nap to refresh myself.

During this nap I had a vivid dream (I still dream even during short naps ever since my polyphasic sleep experimentation), and suddenly in the middle of the dream, Ron appeared to me. I wasn’t lucid at the time, so I didn’t know I was dreaming. In the dream I ran up to him, gave him a big hug, and exclaimed, “Ron! What are you doing here? I thought you were dead! What happened?”

Ron, however, just stood there and didn’t say a word. He didn’t even reciprocate the hug, which made me feel a bit stupid for initiating it. At that point I started becoming lucid and realized I was actually dreaming. I understood this wasn’t Ron in physical form, but it definitely felt like his energy. However, I still couldn’t get him to say anything. He didn’t even make eye contact with me. He just stared straight ahead looking stunned.

I woke up from the dream shortly thereafter, feeling very emotional about the experience. I told Erin what happened, and she encouraged me to see if I could tune back in and receive a message from him. I agreed it was worth a try, but I wanted to stay conscious, so instead of going back to sleep, I attempted to reconnect via meditation. I should mention that while Erin also knew Ron, she didn’t know him nearly as well as I did, partly because I was in a Toastmasters club and a National Speakers Association chapter with Ron, but Erin wasn’t.

As I began to meditate, I still felt a strong connection to Ron’s energy, and I could clearly see him in my mind’s eye, but he was just standing there and not saying a word. Nor did he seem to be attempting any sort of symbolic communication. I figured that since he’d just crossed over, maybe I was simply unable to get a clear enough connection. I spent the next 10 minutes attempting to go into a deeper state of meditation, but there seemed to be no improvement. If he had a message for me, I couldn’t tell what it was because nothing aside from his image was coming through.

I didn’t want to give up though. I thought that maybe Ron wasn’t here to give me a message at all. Maybe he wanted something else. Instead of trying to pull down a message from him, I decided just to try reading his energy instead. I picked up very clearly that he was shocked. I thought maybe he was too stunned to communicate with me, so instead of waiting for him to say something, I just starting talking to him. I wondered if maybe he didn’t know he was actually dead, so I figured that was a good place to start. I confirmed for him what had happened and that he had just crossed over. Based on my limited knowledge of what people experience when they cross over, I gave him some advice. I sent him lots of love energy to try to help raise his vibration. While many entities on the other side have a higher vibration than human beings (such as spirit guides and angels) and have to lower their vibration to communicate with us, I could see that Ron was having the opposite problem. Somehow there was a perfect irony in me coaching him for a change.

This energy work helped. I could see that he was rising up from total shock to the point where he was finally able to start processing what had happened. A few minutes later I was able to communicate with him perfectly. For me this came through clairaudiently, so I was actually hearing his voice in my mind. In fact, it was an unusually clear connection. I was surprised at just how perfectly the voice matched his physical voice. It felt like he was right there in the room with me.

We talked for a good 20 minutes, and basically what he told me was this:

He said he had absolutely “no idea” this was coming. Those were his exact words — “no idea” — which he repeated over and over. He was very sad about that. He said he thought he had a lot more time. This whole thing came as a tremendous shock to him, not because he was alive on the other side, but because his human life had ended so abruptly and unexpectedly. All the goals and plans he had in the works were instantly discontinued by his passing, and I got the sense he felt he’d left a lot undone. I could see that it was very hard for him to accept his death and that he was absolutely stunned by it. There were a lot of things in his physical life he really liked, and it was very hard for him to accept that they were gone.

I felt very compassionately towards him, so I did my best to comfort and console him. He communicated that he should have accomplished more as an individual, that he should have been more aggressive about getting things done. You see, Ron was the kind of person who would often talk to me (and others I presume) about his long-term goals and plans, such as getting his own blog off the ground. However, when it came to taking action, he seemed to have a hard time working on his own goals because he poured so much time into helping others achieve their goals. I know this is what his heart led him to do, but I think he had a hard time getting his head around it.

I reminded Ron of all the good he did and all the people he helped. I tried to help him see that in the long run, individual accomplishment doesn’t mean much, especially once we cross over, and that his best accomplishment here was all the positive ripples he created. I encouraged him to give himself credit for all the people he coached, mentored, and inspired. I think this helped to shift his mindset a little, but I could see it was going to take him a while to process all of this. Dying isn’t something that happens to us every day.

I thanked Ron for all the encouragement he gave me over the years. I ran through a few memories with him, showing him some of the good times we shared. I could tell this helped to raise his energy, not to a super-high level but at least beyond the level of shock and disbelief and on the way towards acceptance.

I told him I was surprised and honored that of all the people he could visit, he chose to come see me. I always felt a fatherly connection to him, but I wasn’t sure if he felt the same. I thought he’d be spending this time around his family. His answer was that he connected with me mainly because he could. Maybe I had the right antennae for receiving him because I’ve practiced developing my skills in this area for many years. He indicated that my (100% raw foods) diet made it easier for him to connect with me. This didn’t surprise me because I’ve felt a significant boost in my psychic/intuitive abilities after dropping all cooked foods from my diet. I think another reason is that I intended to connect with him and believed that I could — that tends to work as sort of a beacon. After we learned of his death, Erin also put out the intent for Ron to come to us if he needed help. It still surprised me that he showed up only a day after he died though. I was thinking it would take at least a few weeks before he was ready for that.

The sense of connection with him was so strong I felt like I could have talked to him for hours — if I could have maintained the right state that long. But once I saw that his energy had risen to a reasonable level, I told him he should take some time to process what had happened to him. I didn’t want to overload him. I also suggested that he should attend his funeral because I thought he’d really enjoy it. I knew the place would be filled with others who loved him. That certainly turned out to be true. There was more humor than sorrow as people shared their happy memories of Ron. I cracked up when a friend compared Ron to Yoda… such an apt analogy.

Two days later, I learned that at least two other friends felt they had visitations from Ron. They processed their experiences differently than I did, but I found it fascinating to learn that Ron was already getting around. Perhaps his Toastmasters skills proved helpful to him over there. After all, working on your human communication skills shares a lot of overlap with learning how to share your energy openly and authentically. I also think Ron felt that Toastmasters was an extension of his family, so he already had a very strong connection to members of this group.

I’ve connected with Ron several more times since his passing. He seems to be hanging around a lot, and I continue to help him adapt to life on the other side, giving him suggestions for things to try over there. With each passing day, I can see that he’s doing better and better. He’s learning to accept his death, and I sense that he’s already looking into mentoring and coaching people from the other side. I know he’ll be a real asset over there. I told him that if he needed any help that he could always come to me, and I’d do what I can. I also invited him to keep mentoring me on my own path as a speaker. I told him he should feel free to decline, but he seemed to really like that idea. Even though he never got the opportunity to get going as a blogger, I think he likes having indirect access to a bigger audience than he was ever likely to build for his own blog. Ron was the kind of man who celebrated the successes of those he coached as if they were his own personal victories.

The past few days have been a pretty emotional time for me, but I don’t feel my relationship with Ron has ended. It’s only been transformed. I keep thinking about the ideas I wrote about in The Joy of Sadness — how sadness and joy are really two sides of the same whole. While I’ve cried a lot during the past few days, it’s been coming from a place of deep gratitude, joy, and a sense of the beautiful perfection of life. I feel very much in a place of love, not a place of loss. I know that Ron’s energy will always be a part of me. Yoda has simply merged back into the force.

Paying it forward

Since he was such a treasure-trove of advice, I learned many lessons from Ron over the years. Perhaps one of the best lessons came from observing what he did. Ron used his knowledge and experience to help other people grow. The new ideas he absorbed were constantly flowing back out again through his continuous sharing.

When I first joined Toastmasters in 2004, I was looking to improve my speaking skills. I knew I eventually wanted to get into pro speaking. From Ron’s example I learned the importance of contributing to others, not just soaking up info for my own use. Even when he wasn’t personally presenting a workshop or training program, he was encouraging other people to do so, and he was actively promoting them too.

In the following years, I delivered a free Toastmasters workshop to help local speakers learn about blogging. I also did two similar workshops for the National Speakers Association, including an all-day workshop on the Vegas Strip. In May of this year, I presented another free Toastmasters workshop on creating compelling content. Creating and presenting these workshops required many hours of extra work. These experiences helped me step into the place of being able to give from my heart without needing anything in return.

A mutual friend told me that Ron’s family would be accepting donations for the Ralph C. Smedley Memorial Fund, to be given in Ron’s name. Ralph Smedley was the founder of Toastmasters. Erin and I agreed it would be nice to make a donation to this fund on Ron’s behalf.

On Saturday evening I was feeling very ungrounded, partly because I was spending so much time in a higher than usual state of being, so I thought it would be wise to go out and do something to ground me back on the side of the physical world. I hadn’t played poker in months, so I thought that would be fun to do, not so much for the game but just to go out and be around people who were at a more “normal” energy level. Erin was happy to spend a quiet evening alone, but she suggested that I donate any winnings to the memorial fund. I thought that was a good idea. I’m a decent player and usually win, but at the low limits I play, I could expect to return with maybe $50 on average.

I popped over to the Red Rock Casino, which is only a few minutes from my house. I’ve never played poker there before, but I didn’t feel like making the 20-minute drive to the Strip, so I figured I’d check it out. On Saturday nights the city’s poker tables can be pretty crowded though, especially during the summer, so I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get a seat. Upon arriving at the poker room, it was packed full, and based on the length of the waiting list, I estimated it could take as much two hours to get a seat. Oh well. I didn’t want to wait that long.

I figured I might as well stretch my legs, so I walked around for a while. The Red Rock is considered by many to be the best local’s casino in town. In addition to the hotel and casino, it has a huge movie theater complex, a conference center, a bowling alley, a spa, a food court, a night club, and lots of restaurants. Portions of the recent movie 21 were filmed there. As I walked around, I sensed Ron’s presence again. I was surprised that he’d come to me in a casino of all places. He didn’t seem to have any message for me. He was just letting me know that he was around.

An idea struck me, so I asked him if he wanted to have a little fun. I never knew Ron to take any interest in casino gambling — I know a few locals who work in the casinos but none who like to gamble — but I figured that due to his Wall Street background, he might be up for something interesting. I told him that poker was out, so I asked him if he was up for some blackjack. He agreed. I told him we’d be playing for a donation to Toastmasters. If I lost the money, we’d still donate maybe $100 (almost two years of annual dues), but if we won more than $100, we’d donate all the winnings. I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to influence anything from the other side, especially since he was a newbie there, but I told him I’d appreciate any help he could provide. Otherwise I could certainly handle myself well enough. I learned to beat blackjack when I was 21, and the skill is so burned into my neurons that I can go a year or more without playing a single hand and still automatically know what to do in every situation without having to think. The play is totally subconscious, much like driving a car or riding a bike.

I picked out a good $10 table, opting to vary my bets from $10 to $50, and bought $200 in chips. If I doubled my money, that would be a really good win. At these limits nobody at the casino is going to care whether I win or lose. On a Saturday night, a $10 table is typically the lowest you’ll find. I can afford to play higher limits, but that doesn’t interest me. For me this was just a game, not a career.

I played for an hour and left the table with $505 in chips, a win of $305. I thought that would be a nice donation. I walked around a bit to stretch my legs. Then I asked Ron if he wanted to keep playing or if we should quit. He said we should go one more round. He seemed like he was actually enjoying this experiment. I picked out another $10 table and sat down. At first I wasn’t getting anywhere, but then when I had my $50 bet out there, I split a pair of sixes and won both hands for a gain of $100. The next hand I got an 11, doubled down, and won another $100. And the hand after that I got a blackjack for a $75 win. After that I got a 20 and pushed. That’s when I heard the signal from Ron, “Time to go.” I left with $780 in chips for a net win of $580 (that’s net of both sessions). For only 90 minutes of play at fairly low limits, this kind of win is just amazing, especially at full tables (which means fewer hands per hour). I probably played about 50 hands total. That means we averaged more than $10 per hand, but my average bet per hand was probably $20-25. That’s a pretty serious win rate.

I could sense Ron’s presence the whole time I played. I don’t know if he was actually able to do anything from his end, but I definitely got far more than my fair share of splits, double downs, and blackjacks. The other players, the dealers, and the pit boss couldn’t help but notice how quickly the chips were flowing to me. Believe me — this win wasn’t due to skill. On average I’d be lucky to win an extra $20 under these conditions, since the edge on blackjack (assuming you really know how to play) is very slight, especially when playing in a multi-deck game. Doubling my money would have been outstanding.

When I got home, I told Erin what happened, and she was amazed. You see, the last time we invited a “spirit” to play with us for a certain cause, we won $445 in 45 minutes, which totally stunned us then. To have it happen again makes it harder to dismiss as a fluke.

Given the rarity of a win like this, I have to credit it to Ron. I don’t know what he did, but it worked. There’s such a sweet perfection in the notion that he could still be contributing to Toastmasters from the other side. Since I felt the $580 was his contribution, I bumped our donation to $1000 to include something from me and Erin as well. Although we already pay dues, conference registration fees, and various other sums to support Toastmasters International, I like that we can give back a little extra to support such a wonderful organization.

Initially I hesitated to share this part of the story, partly because it’s so strange and partly because I don’t want to deal with the headache of people misinterpreting my motivation for sharing it. But ultimately I figured it was best to share this part of the story for three reasons: (1) It’s the truth; (2) I know from experience that when I share a story I’m hesitant to post publicly, it’s going to resonate with someone out there in ways I can’t predict, often in very synchronistic ways; and (3) I’m sure the skeptics could use the exercise.

Seize the day

Now the point isn’t to pray to your ancestors to help you win the lottery. The point is to live — REALLY LIVE — while you’re here.

What will the people attending your memorial service say about you? How will you be remembered?

Hold your own memorial service at the end of each day. Did you live this day to the fullest? Did you give your very best? Did you express the real you? Did you make the effort to connect with people? Did you seize this day, or did you let it slip through your fingers?

Are you playing it safe just to survive, or are you stretching to give your very best? In the end, do you really think anyone will care whether or not you paid your bills on time?

Life is way too short to waste your precious time doing work you don’t love, enduring relationships you merely tolerate, and settling for limiting thoughts that hold you back. If you decide to waste this day, that’s the same as deciding to waste your life because your life is happening right now.

The mindset that says it’s okay to lose today is the mindset of death. If you’re squandering this day — and I mean today — then you’re already dead. You just haven’t accepted it yet. The rest of your days will be spent the same way. You’re reading this article in the Grim Reaper’s waiting room, waiting for your name to be called.

Too often we treat survival as our first priority, and only after we secure that can we move onto something more interesting than survival, like discovering a life purpose. But you aren’t here to survive. Do you realize you’re not going to survive? You’re going to die. Your physical life here is temporary. If you set survival as your goal, you lose automatically. Everyone who tries to survive fails. That’s how the game is set up. It’s supposed to happen that way.

Even a monkey gets more enjoyment out of life than a human being who works just to pay the bills. Monkeys find it silly to center their lives around paying their bills. They find it much more interesting to hang out with other monkeys — even if it means being homeless.

Would you say that your computer’s primary purpose is to survive? Or is it to provide you with information and entertainment and to empower you? You know your computer is eventually going to die (yes, even your precious Mac), so enjoy it while you can.

Are you enjoying your life while you can?

If you need a little hint to help you find your life purpose, it has to do with going out and connecting with people. If you’re trying to work on your purpose while spending most of your days isolated and alone, you’re missing the point. Go outside! Sure, it’s scary. But do it anyway. If the monkeys can manage it, why not you. Surely you’re smarter and more capable than a monkey.

It’s sad that we often fail to give ourselves permission to just dive headfirst into what we love doing. Realize you don’t need anyone’s permission to do what you love — or to connect with people that attract you. If some people object, let them object; then go do it anyway. The monkeys will welcome you as their new friend.

You know you’ll be happier outside the cage. The cage may be safe and cozy, but it’s no substitute for the freedom of the jungle.

Don’t wait to pursue your dreams. Life is far too precious for that.

Your life is today, not tomorrow or yesterday. Regardless of what happened in the past or what you think might happen in the future, today you have the freedom to make a conscious choice. Will it be the same choice you’ve always made, or will it be something different? Will that choice come from your heart?

Ron Lewison took the time to reach out and connect with people while he was here. He touched a lot of lives in a positive way. He may not have had the opportunity to complete all the projects he wanted to, but he gave more than his fair share. And because of that, I think he’ll find peace on the other side, and perhaps even more opportunities to coach and mentor people. Moreover, he gave the gift of many positive memories to those who knew him, a gift that continues to endure.

Ron, your presence will be missed in the physical world, but I think you’ll make quite a splash in the spiritual world. On the physical side, I may have to say goodbye, but on the spiritual side, I can say welcome home.

You are loved.

* * *

Note: I mentioned in the previous article that I would post a how-to article on raising your financial vibration next. Rest assured that article is still pending. As Ron recently discovered, sometimes life messes with your schedule.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.

Channeling my inner Seth Godin, here we go…

What is the purpose of life?

The purpose of life is to increase your alignment with truth, love, and power.

You are here to:

1. Discover and accept ever deeper truths.
2. Learn to love more deeply and unconditionally.
3. Develop and express your creativity.

#1 leads to wisdom.

#2 leads to joy.

#3 leads to strength.

The point of life is to learn to be wise, joyful, and strong — all at the same time and without compromising or sacrificing any of these. In order to improve one, you must improve all three.

If these pursuits aren’t your life’s highest priority, you’ve missed the point of life entirely. You’ll have a better sense of that when you die, at which point you will lose:

1. Your physical body
2. All your stuff (money, home, possessions)
3. Your positions and titles
4. Your physical relationships

If there is an afterlife, it’s likely that the only element of your existence you can possibly retain is your consciousness. Therefore, if you seek to increase your alignment with truth, love, and power, you may have the opportunity to retain those gains even after your physical death because such gains are nonphysical. Everything else stays here.

On the other hand, even if there is no afterlife, the pursuit of truth, love, and power while you’re here will make your physical existence much more meaningful and fulfilling as you experience it. Physical life becomes significantly easier when you root yourself to the permanent instead of chasing the temporary. Truth, love, and power are permanent because they’re universal concepts. Wherever there is consciousness, these concepts have meaning.

Regardless of what happens when you die, if you center your life around the pursuit of truth, love, and power, you can’t lose. You’ll have done your best.

Whenever you turn your back on truth, love, or power, you distance yourself from experiencing wisdom, joy, and strength. This means you’ll experience confusion, unhappiness, and weakness instead. Whatever problems you currently face can be resolved by realigning yourself with truth, love, and power.

Truth.

Love.

Power.

This is how you win the game of life.

Questions? Ask Seth.

Achieve new breakthroughs in your habits, career, finances, relationships, health, and spiritual development. Register now to attend the transformational 3-day Conscious Growth Workshop in Las Vegas, January 15-17, 2010.

© 2009 by Steve Pavlina.