One of the reasons the idea of being able to manifest is so foreign to most of us is because we have been brought up to believe that as individuals we are separate from our environment. We think it is our role to dominate our environment and describe ourselves as individuals within the environment. Armed with this kind of logic, we are diminished in our ability to sense our connection to our environment.
Because of our sense of disconnection we believe we do not have the power to attract what we want from our environment. Consequently, we feel it is merely a matter of luck or happenstance when we succeed in manifesting. When we change this idea about ourselves, we activate our ability to manifest and see it as a function of our divinity rather than as being an impossibility or an incident of luck or coincidence.
This third principle of manifesting begins with the understanding that it is absolutely impossible to describe ourselves as separate from our environment. I am coining a new word, a neologism, for the purpose of articulating this principle. For the rest of this chapter consider yourself as an “environorganism.” This word signifies that there is absolutely no difference between you and your environment. You are your environment, and even more significantly, for the purposes of this book, your environment is you.
OUR NATURE AS AN ENVIRONORGANISM
Try thinking of the external world, your environment, as your extended body. That is, you are not separate from the external world you see. In this concept it is impossible to describe yourself without including your surroundings. In fact, it is not even possible to see or hear yourself as a separate entity apart from your environment.
For example, describe yourself walking, just you walking. There cannot be walking without also describing whatever it is you are walking upon. Without the floor or the ground, there would only be your legs moving back and forth, and, of course, that is not walking. Your experience of walking also includes the air you are breathing while you are walking, the gravity that keeps you from floating off into space, the pebbles, or carpet, or sand, or cement that you walk on and the makeup of these elements in the pebbles and carpet, and on and on.
In addition to your walking as an example of you as an environorganism, examine the page that you are reading in this moment. What do you actually see? Black ink formed into words that you are reading. Try to imagine these words without the presence of the background upon which they are printed. The white page on which the words are printed does not receive your primary attention, yet this page you are holding as a unit of a book creates a meaning in combination with the individual units of print called words. The environment in which those words are inseparably enmeshed is the page itself.
In this analogy, you are the words and your background is everything upon which you are imprinted. This principle is important to understand if you are going to become a manifester. Just as the stars in the sky would be impossible to perceive without the background of the dark sky, and you couldn’t see your own body or the body of anyone else without a background that is in contrast to that body, so does this principle apply to you.
You cannot be described independent of your environment, and I invite you to shift your awareness away from yourself as an organism in the environment to yourself as an extension of your environment and always inseparable from it. The result of this thinking will be that you begin to see that everything in your environment is a part of you and vice versa. Your environment is not something that you must either push or it will push you around. It is an extension of yourself, just as you are an extension of the environment.
This is a unique concept to grasp. It is imperative, however, for understanding the premise of this book. You are both distinct and inseparable from your environment.
BEING AN INDIVIDUAL AND AN ENVIRONMENT SIMULTANEOUSLY
Have you ever seen a person with a front but without a back? Have you ever seen a person with an outside but without an inside? These rhetorical questions are meant to stimulate you to consider how you can be differentiated and undifferentiated at the same time, and why this is important in learning to manifest your life as you choose.
The nature of this physical world is essentially that of waves. Each wave of energy that makes up a physical mass has a crest or a peak and a nadir or a valley. These tops and bottoms of the wave are always easy to identify as separate, yet they are always together. You cannot ever get a bucketful of peaks and observe them independent of their corresponding valleys. This is the fundamental feature of nature. The north and south poles of a magnet are always together, yet always distinct. Your front always has a back, your inside always has an outside, and now you must extend this understanding outward as well.
Of course you are an individual who functions within this environment, and it is possible to describe both you and your environment with separate identifying terminology that all of us would understand. But, you must also remember that you cannot separate you from your environment either. You are distinct, just as the tops of the waves are distinct from the bottoms, but you are irrevocably connected to the outer world just as that bottom of the wave always has a top.
When you begin to see this simple truth, mystical experiences of manifesting also open up to you as a genuine possibility. Most of us have failed to grasp this little truth, and it has led us on a disastrous course of feeling that because we are separate from our environment, we must exercise control over it. When we do this, we, of course, are showing not only a lack of respect for our environment, but for our own basic nature as an environorganism as well.
PUSHING NATURE AROUND OR SEEING IT AS OURSELVES
When we think of ourselves as distinct from our environment, we take on a posture of exercising control over it. This kind of thinking leads us into destructive behavior on both the collective and the personal levels.
We destroy forests, swamps, mountains, rivers, wildlife or anything else that obstructs profit and convenience or for something we call “advancing” civilization. We defend these activities without understanding that we are also destroying ourselves. Ultimately we will make earth uninhabitable if we fail to see that we are killing a part of ourselves with this wanton disregard for nature.
We all need to begin to experience ourselves as part of our total environment. Then perhaps we will discontinue trying to beat that same environment into submission. We fail to treat it with love, gentleness and respect because we are convinced that it is something other than ourselves that we are defeating. As we have seen, we cannot be described independent of our environment any more than our outside can be described without our inside.
The idea of ourselves as an environorganism commands our respect for everything that we encounter. When we can respect that which appears to be external to us, we will build to live in harmony with, rather than in control over, our environment.
In our personal lives, recognizing nature as ourselves opens up an entire new world of manifestation. We see ourselves in an intelligent world. Thus, the intelligence that is in myself is also in my environment. With this awareness we tend to see the connection to everything much more clearly. We know that whatever appears to be lacking in our lives is really due to our having been misinformed when we were taught that what seems to be missing can be found outside us.
As an environorganism, I know that the energy of what appears to be missing in my personal environment and the energy of my own body (inside and outside, front and back) is all the same. So, anything I view as lacking is because I see myself as removed from what I want rather than as connected to it.
This is the beginning of the awareness that you can attract everything to yourself because you are already inextricably attached to it at an energy level. The notion of viewing it as unavailable begins to disappear and you see manifesting as nothing more than materializing an aspect of yourself of which you have previously been unaware.
You will see yourself not only in your environment, but in everything and everyone that is a part of that environment. Your new faith will no longer permit you to see anything as separate. The separateness will always be there, just as the peak of the wave is separate from the trough, but they will remain inseparable even though separate, different yet undifferentiated at the same time. You will have fused the dichotomy that prevents you from putting this connective energy to work. You will begin to view yourself as an organic part of this world rather than as a separate entity in this world.
SEEING YOURSELF AS AN ORGANIC PART OF THIS WORLD
There is a popular belief that we “come into this world.” Thus we are continuously embracing the idea that who we are and where we come from are two different worlds. The essence of this third spiritual principle for manifesting your destiny is that there is no separation, and rather than coming into this world as a construction project, that you actually grow out of it.
Take a look at a plum tree and examine how plums appear in our world. You plant a seed and the tree grows, ultimately blossoming and producing plums. The intelligence that is in the plum is in this world, and so, too, is it in the seed, the blossom, the trunk, the branches and the roots. Every single element of the plum tree has plum intelligence built into it. We do not say that plums show up from the spiritual world of plum essence, and then become physical earth-plane fruit. In fact, as we look at a plum tree, we could say with all candor that it plums. Every year the thing just plums.
In the same way that a plum tree plums, you, too, grow out of this world, with the same energy that is in every aspect of your being. Were you to look at the earth from a distance you would observe that it has rocks, oceans, vegetation, and that the thing actually peoples. You are a result of what the universe is doing on a conscious level, just as a wave is what the ocean is doing and a plum is what the plum tree is doing. The intelligence that is you, unseen as it may be, is you in every stage of your creation and life experience, and it is also the same in every other person as well as in all things in our physical world.
Most of us were taught quite the contrary. Creation is generally thought of as divided into the spiritual realm of the unseen and the physical world of matter. Also, that we are the result of an act of construction, and rather than growing out of the world, we were put into it. This, of course, reinforces the idea of powerlessness in having anything to do with the act of creation. To empower yourself to become a co-creator in the affairs of your life, you will have to leave these old ideas behind, but mind you, they do not die easily. The conditioning process is embedded in the bedrock of your existence.
When you come to see yourself as growing out of this world, you see that the native intelligence that was in the very seed of your procreation is an energy flowing through everything in your world. You and the environment of that growth process are distinctly identifiable but always connected. Inseparable in the same way as your breathing and the air you breathe, your walking and the ground upon which you walk and your thoughts and the organism with which you think.
Notice that everyone breathes the same air, walks on the same ground and thinks as an organism, just like you. You are, indeed, connected to all of these beings. It is not an accident that someone living in a distant country, with different outward physical characteristics and a separate language, could die and donate his or her liver or kidney or cornea to you, and it would accommodate the life force flowing in you. This idea of growing out of the world or being a result of the earth peopling as a plum tree plums is advantageous to the process of manifesting your own destiny. It empowers you with the wisdom of creation rather than making you a puppet whose strings are controlled by external forces.
When we believe that what is outside me is not me, and that we are not a part of the peopling process of the earth, we cultivate an attitude of estrangement and hostility. This mentality leads us to talk of our conquest of the environment, which means that we cannot capitalize on the awareness of being a connected being. The need to conquer puts us at odds with the world.
A profoundly important Native American saying is: “No tree has branches so foolish as to fight among themselves.” Imagine the result of such behavior by the tree! The tree and all of its parts would die from such an absurdity. Yet that is precisely what we do when we see ourselves as divided from all of the other people who are being peopled from the same divine intelligence.
We grow out of our world and are the result of what the divine intelligence is doing, and we can never lose that connection. You might think of yourself as a symptom of the universe rather than as a stranger in this universe.
What we have all come to think of as the spirit within us is actually that divine, unseen intelligence that caused you, and continues to cause you to grow out of this world. It, too, is inseparable from your physical essence, your environment and everyone and everything else in this universe. If you think otherwise, then you reinforce your inability to influence your destiny and to manifest or attract anything to you.
When you know that you grow out of this world just as an apple does from an apple tree, then you identify with this spiritual essence. It is in identification with this inner essence that you make your connection to everything else. And it is with this connection that you begin to attract your desires to your physical world. This power of attraction will be the subject matter of the fourth principle described in this book.
For now, I want you to gain a clear sense of how you are actually growing out of the world. I want you to perceive the difference in this concept from one that promulgates our arrival here from a separate world by a power that is outside us. You are not a momentary flash of embodied consciousness between two eternal blacknesses. You are an essence that is eternally growing in this world, a world in which the spirit and the manifestation of that spirit appear to be different to the senses, and indeed they are, but they are also connected. You are both of these essences at once.
It is this awareness that is crucial as you proceed along this manifesting path. It is a power, but make no mistake about it, contrary to what your ego might tell you, you do not get to own this power exclusively.
THE POWER IS IN YOU BUT IS NOT YOURS ALONE
The power and the magic of this world cannot be reserved for the exclusive use of anyone, including you. It is available at all times; however, it does not belong to anyone. What you are doing as an environorganism is making contact with an energy that is beyond the dualism of the earth plane, and yet is connected to it at the same time, separate but distinct.
The way to make this contact is to understand this energy. Everything on the physical plane experiences lightness and darkness. If it were always light we would not have a concept of dark. But there is something that could never know darkness. That is the source of all light, the sun. The source is beyond the duality of the physical plane. It is this source of energy that you want to contact when you are empowering yourself.
You do not own the energy of the sun, but it is always available to you. That energy is not subject to the laws of duality, nor is your spirit, which is the source of your divine power. But it is still you, and yours to use.
You cannot own this power any more than you can own and control the environment. To own it means you separate from it. There becomes an owner and that which is owned, and this violates the principle of you as an environorganism. You are a holistic being with both nondualistic energy and the energy of the physical plane as a part of your being at your disposal.
You are a whole being. You therefore need a holistic view of yourself as an environorganism in order to understand yourself. To conceptualize yourself as a spiritual and physical being separate from your environment is to remove any potential for knowing your holistic state. As a holistic being you shatter the illusion of your separateness and reveal your connection to everything. This empowers you in a way that the ego-driven self could never contemplate.
SEEING YOURSELF AS A HOLOGRAM
One of the most intriguing ways to see yourself in the way that I am describing in this third principle is to look at a hologram and then project yourself into this viewpoint. If, somehow, you were able to see all of humanity along with everything else that exists simultaneously, you would have a vision of the hologrammatic nature of the universe. As it is, you are stuck being able to see only tiny segments of the earth at one time.
A hologram is a three-dimensional photographic image obtained with laser beams. The unique thing about a hologram is that one small segment contains the entire picture. When one tiny piece of the hologram is broken off and projected, it shows an image of the entire object.
The hologram is a perfect representation for you as an environorganism. Your environment includes everyone, alive and dead, and you can draw their energy to you because, from a hologrammatic viewpoint, they are you. You are one little physical image that reflects all of humanity when projected spiritually upon the cosmic screen. Each and every one of us is the whole of humanity. You cannot escape this conclusion.
The understanding of holograms can be applied intrinsically and extrinsically. One tiny segment of your body can be cut off and projected through a laser beam, and your entire body will be reflected from that one tiny piece. Each and every cell of your being contains the energy of your entire being. On an extrinsic level, you are one of those segments that reflect all of humanity as a hologram.
Unfortunately, the peoples of the world have yet to apply this hologrammatic understanding to their living. Seeing ourselves as connected to all of humanity is an idea whose time will come, and it will not be stopped. History shows us how we have carved ourselves up into nations with various ideologies such as capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism, communism, monarchism and democracy that often transcend the importance of humanity itself. We have classified ourselves on the basis of physical appearance and nationalistic identifications such as Italian, American and Japanese. We have further subdivided ourselves into classes based upon our economic levels or the colors of our collars.
Countries are further divided between the political right and left and religious beliefs, and the division continues right on down into families and, eventually, into individuals. The process of division is the opposite of the hologram model of our reality.
Essentially, like it or not, human beings are the same everywhere. We share the emotions of fear, love, hate and jealousy. We also share our life-giving blood, intermingling it for the survival of those who need it, and we have the same internal organs and thoughts. Yet our egos persist in the work of division.
When we look at our individual selves there is also the inclination to divide ourselves, which leads us away from our divine nature and removes us from the world of manifesting our destiny. We need to monitor the internal conflict with which we divide ourselves. The ego creates divisive thoughts such as the following: the difference between what I am and what I should be; how I behave and how I should behave; how I used to be and how I am today; what I have been told by others is what I should be; how messed up I am in reality; what I think and how I feel; how I look and how much better others look; how much I make, how much others make and how much I need. The list is potentially endless.
All of this conflict as a result of our propensity to divide and subdivide ourselves at the world, national, social or individual level is an expression of chaos. We cannot bring order to the world or to our lives as long as we fail to recognize that, in reality, all human beings are holograms of humanity. We all reflect the whole, and it is essential for us to begin to think in this way.
When you perceive yourself in the hologram that is humanity, you connect on an energy level to everyone else in your environment. An environorganism most truly is a reflection of it all, and this energy that you share is shared by all. This awareness gives you the option to tap into this universal energy anywhere, at any time, by metaphorically projecting yourself to reflect the whole. When you can do this projecting without doubt or reservation, you can literally see how your inner thoughts and desires are not only within you, but are within the whole of humanity, which is abundantly boundless. This is accomplished by simply changing your beliefs from a separate ego to that of an environorganism.
As an environorganism, you are a single individual who is only a part of the picture at the same time that you contain the whole panorama. Moreover, the content of your consciousness, which differs from person to person, is also hologrammatic in nature. Consciousness is the mental condition of being aware. Your individual thoughts, while they form only a part of the total picture of human consciousness, simultaneously contain the whole of human consciousness.
Like a hologram, your thoughts reflect the thoughts of all. The power of your thoughts in this hologrammatic view can be projected in such a way as to connect to all of humanity. Your thoughts are, literally, connected to the thoughts of everyone else, as are your emotions, your desires, your total inner world. You can learn to use this connection to nurture your own divinity and, therefore, by definition, the divinity of all of humanity.
The nature of a hologram and the nature of you as an environorganism are one and the same. The energy that comprises your humanity is in everything around you. You are it, it is you. You are not separate from it. The Bhagavad Gita summarizes this point of view as profoundly as I’ve ever found. Commit these holy words to memory as you practice the art of spiritual manifesting in your daily life. They will serve you well wherever you are, and in whatever way you believe your current life circumstances are incomplete.
He who sees that the Lord of all is ever the same in all that is—immortal in the field of mortality—he sees the truth. And when a man sees that the God in himself is the same God in all that is, he hurts not himself by hurting others. Then he goes, indeed, to the highest path.
The key phrase in this profound passage is “in all that is.” This includes you and me and everything that is. It is you. You are not separate from it. Use some of the following suggestions to implement this understanding and truly experience this third principle of spiritual manifesting.
SUGGESTIONS FOR LIVING THIS PRINCIPLE
The Seed Market
Can you find another market like this?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where,
for one seed
you get a whole wilderness?
For one weak breath,
the divine wind?
You’ve been fearful
Of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up by the air.
Now, your waterbead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had,
but it’s still water.
The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting.
It’s a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at once, quickly,
for God’s sake!
Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.
No amount of searching
will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.
—FROM The Essential Rumi
TRANSLATIONS BY COLEMAN BARKS WITH JOAN MOYNE
This is the third principle of spiritual manifestation. We are all simultaneously our own beings and all that is outside us as well. We cannot ever separate ourselves from our environment while we are in a physical body. Knowing this puts us in touch with the energy of attraction that is the subject matter of the fourth principle.