part0028

Your reasoning mind and ego will come up with pervasive ways to convince you that things are not working. For example, it will tempt you to look at your bank balance and attempt to convince you that things are still the same, just because your bank balance remains the same. Or it may come up with illogical, limiting beliefs such as, “Look at all these people walking around you, they are all richer than you!” These are some of the somewhat negative beliefs that my negative self, my ego, came up with in order to encourage me to abandon this work. I am speaking of the “ego” here as if it is an adversary, which is not really the case. True, your ego comes up with ways and means to convince you otherwise, but recall that its sole purpose is to keep you safe. Ironically, its methods of keeping you “safe” and “secure” are rooted in deep social conditioning, and often run contrary to spiritual truths. Once you experience the essence of these spiritual truths, you will never buy into the stories of your ego again.

The ego and your reasoning mind demand physical proof for everything you propose. Therefore, they will not believe in something until they see physical proof of it. Unfortunately though, there are many things in life for which there is no physical proof, and we simply have to take those things at faith. When you plant a seed in the ground, there is no immediate physical proof that it is germinating and growing, so we have to just take it in good faith. Abraham-Hicks gives the wonderful example of how we have no “physical proof” that our dogs can hear frequencies inaudible to humans, and yet we accept it on faith. It is true that we can do all sorts of scientific tests using instruments to validate that those frequencies are perceptible to dogs, but we can’t hear them ourselves, can we? Therefore, we take more things on faith than we realize.

Why can’t it be the same when it comes to the subject of money? Again, this is due to the massive social conditioning that we have received on the subject on money. We have been trained, over-and-over again, to be skeptical about how money comes to us, to work hard for money. But realize that these are all just stories about money that have been concocted by our egos. These stories are not real. They can become real though if you fervently insist on believing in them. But why believe in stories that are unresourceful to you?

When I walked into a bank in the past, the negative thought that “these people are probably all richer than you despite the way they look” cropped up automatically for me. It was an extremely mean and nasty thought, meant to torment myself into guilt and shame. While I write of this experience as if someone else was trying to inflict this suffering on me, I realize today that no one was inflicting any pain on me except myself! I was imposing these sufferings on myself, through my deep feelings of guilt and shame surrounding money. These negative thoughts spontaneously arose because of my negative feelings of guilt and shame surrounding money. I am both the thinker of those thoughts, and also the person who was perceiving the thought.

When such a thought crops up, do not judge or blame yourself for having these negative perceptions. The first thing you should do is to cultivate what I call a meta-awareness, and take the stance of an observer. Recognize as a passive observer that such thoughts are floating up spontaneously for you. But thoughts don’t just surface without reason. Underneath (or attached to) each thought is actually a whole series of negative beliefs, feelings and emotions. Think of a thought as a ship that is being anchored to a deep and heavy rock at the bottom of the sea bed. That thought which just surfaced in your mind is just that ship sailing by, and many of these ships sail by every single day. Each ship, however, is dragging a heavy rock just beneath the water, which we don’t usually observe. The more rocks you have being dragged around by these ships, the more drained you are, and the less effective your manifestations will be due to these energy seepages. This is the idea which I explore in greater detail in my book “It Is Done!”.

For now, let’s focus on the ship that just sailed past. The ship that says, “These people are probably all richer than you!” Recognize that this ship is anchored to a heavy rock beneath the water surface that says “guilt about money” or “guilt about not having enough money”. Also recognize the whole story for what it truly is — That it is all made up! None of it is true unless you believe in it! If you continue believing in the story (the ship), you will constantly be dragging that heavy rock around. You can just as easily cut the ropes that anchor the ship to the rock by saying, “I don’t believe in this story anymore” and free yourself from the negative, draining energy of these hidden negative beliefs you have about money.

Another way which your ego may come up with at the beginning to convince you that things are not working is to show you lots of physical evidence about things you cannot afford. For example, in my early days of doing this work, expensive things that I could not afford became particularly conspicuous! I would notice something and then go, “That’s another thing I can never afford despite trying all these techniques!” Again, that is another ship sailing by in my stream of consciousness. Guess what rock that ship is anchored to… That’s right, another rock that says “guilt about not having enough money”!

Do you now see why doing these exercises are so valuable? Had I not taken the time to examine my own thoughts about money using the analogy above, I would have believed in and entertained all of the “ships” that were just sailing by. And that was exactly what I did for a long ten years of my life. I believed in those “ships” that were just drifting by, day in and day out, every single day. Those thoughts made me mentally drained, depressed and unhappy because I was dragging all these heavy rocks around beneath the surface. But can you see now the self-insights that one can gain by simply sitting down and examining what lies beneath the water surface? Do you see how two of my thoughts are both anchored / linked to the same rock? Therefore, the issue that really needs to be addressed here is one of guilt / shame about not having enough money. The moment you stop buying into any of the stories told to you by your past conditioning, these big rocks stop having any emotional impact on you and your manifestations will happen very fast. It is as if you are cutting away all these ropes that anchor the ships to the rocks.

This goes back to what we have talked about in the first half of this book, in which I told you to give up your unresourceful beliefs and stories about money. For most people, it is usually more resourceful to completely give up all their beliefs about money and enter into a zero, clean slate, because so much of our beliefs about money are negative. You would be much better giving up all of your existing beliefs about money and then implanting new ones, rather than trying to identify which ones work and which ones don’t. At the beginning when so many negative beliefs and thoughts were sailing past my mind about money, I often spent a lot of my time and energy “entertaining” each of these thoughts. I sincerely believed in them. Ever since I immersed myself in the practice of these spiritual principles, I have been able to give up my beliefs in them completely and say, “I’m going to heck all of these stories I’m making up!” Indeed, all of these are only stories we have made up to perpetuate our own hidden beliefs.