REACTING TO YOUR MANIFESTATIONS WITH GRATITUDE AND GENEROSITY

The Ninth Principle

The conscious expression of gratitude and generosity is the final principle in this miraculous process of spiritual manifestation. Experiencing an inner sense of gratitude and generosity is the result of being in harmony with all of the other eight principles discussed in this book.

Gratitude is your expression of acknowledging the oneness of the universal energy working in cooperation with your desires.

THE NATURE OF GRATITUDE

The nature of gratitude is the complete and full response of the human heart to everything in the universe. It is an absence of feeling alienated or separate. It represents our full acknowledgment and appreciation of the energy flowing through all things, and brings gifts to us in the form of the fulfillment of our desires.

It recognizes that nothing is to be taken for granted, and, most important, it is an expression of complete, unconditional love in the form of a thank you to the God force that is in all things. It is a way of being one with the God force in full inner serenity. It recognizes that the spirit within ourselves is the same as that which sustains all life on the planet.

Gratitude, then, represents the whole of ourselves. When we feel grateful and give thanks, sending out this kind of loving energy to the world in the same fashion that we did when we were asking for our heart’s desire to be manifested, we feel complete. Gratitude allows us to feel more together and more connected to that for which we are grateful. It disallows any feeling of being separate and alienated from God. The nature of gratitude helps dispel the idea that we do not have enough, that we will never have enough, and that we ourselves are not enough.

When your heart is filled with gratitude, it is grateful for everything and cannot focus on what is missing. When your attention is on your scarcity, you are telling the universal spirit that you need more and are not grateful for all that you have. The nature of gratitude is supportive of our fullness and abundance, and acknowledges that we are the recipients of the generosity of others, of life and of the universal spirit.

Gratitude contributes a loving response to the whole of creation and to your relationship with creation. That relationship illustrates for us how interconnected and interdependent everything is, including the manifestations in our lives. When we understand the nature of gratitude, we can more clearly identify those things within ourselves that are obstacles to practicing gratitude.

OBSTACLES TO GRATITUDE

Gratitude is an inner process. It is an attitude of thankfulness even when things do not appear as we would prefer. Rumi wrote, “Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come. Some things that don’t happen keep disasters from happening.” Gratitude is a way of experiencing the world with love rather than judgment. The three most common obstacles to an attitude of gratitude originate in your mental processes. They represent a way of thinking that impedes gratitude.

• 1: Faultfinding. No doubt you have heard the phrase “finding fault.” But rarely in the same context do you hear the phrase “finding love.” The emphasis for the majority of us is on faultfinding rather than on love finding.
        You always have the choice to be love finding or faultfinding. The faultfinder focuses on what is wrong and what is missing. That focus shows up as criticism, judgment and anger. The feeling is of being against the manifestations that appear in the world rather than being for what one receives.
        The earlier principles of manifestation explained that it is essential to remember that what we think about is what expands, as is expressed by “As we think, so shall we be.” If you are using your mind to think about what is wrong and what is lacking, this is precisely what will manifest for you. Your inner world is the source of what you manifest. Finding fault rather than being grateful and being a love finder guarantees that you will not be able to participate in the co-creation of your life and the fulfillment of your desires.
        Faultfinding does not happen because of what you observe in your world. It is the observer located within you that chooses a critical or angry point of view.
• 2: Complaining. I have a motto that I have used for many years that is quite simple but is very effective in overcoming this obstacle to an attitude of gratitude: “Don’t complain, don’t explain!”
        The complainer always feels shortchanged and deprived, and consequently becomes envious and bitter toward those who seem to have been blessed with what is missing in his or her own life. The complainer feels isolated and separate from goodness and joyfulness. Because the fullness of life seems to be occurring elsewhere, the complainer is full of ingratitude.
        To become adept at manifesting one’s desires, it is crucial to have an attitude of unconditional love, allowing you to feel supported and given a gift by life. The inner experience of complaining and feeling deprived leads to being angry at the universal source that seems to have denied you the benefit of its infinite supply. The very attitude of wanting to complain is enough to guarantee that you will continue to feel shortchanged in life. Complaining is an expression of the absence of love in your inner world. When you feel love, there is no room for being upset with God for not delivering your ego’s demands.
        The ego constantly instructs you to need and want more, and tells you that complaining helps. The problem with this is that the ego is never satisfied. No matter how much you feed the ego, it will give you a new list of demands almost immediately after being satisfied. If you give it alcohol until it buzzes, and sex until it collapses in ecstasy, and drugs until it is flying high, and money and cars and anything else that you can think of, the next morning it will have an even longer list of demands. The ego is never satisfied, and lives with the slogan that more is always better, and if more does not arrive precisely when the ego is feeling the need, then you have every right to complain. This is a huge obstacle to an attitude of gratitude, and an even larger impediment to manifesting the essence of the desires of your heart.
• 3: Taking what you have for granted. Taking things and people in your life for granted drains you of the joy that you could be experiencing if you were feeling grateful. Taking things for granted means going through life unaware of the multitude of gifts that are here in each and every moment.
        Think of the activities and experiences that would be missed if they suddenly disappeared, and cultivate an awareness that does not take life for granted. Strive to be alert to being a love finder. Remind yourself that there are no ordinary moments. Kicking a ball around with a child, watching the shape of the clouds in the early morning, hearing the sounds of the seasons, saying good night to a loved one—every single experience of life is an opportunity to experience gratitude or its opposite, a feeling of ennui. It is always a choice.
        Sleepwalking through life is a choice to impede the gratitude that is necessary for you to become a manifester. If you take everything for granted with an absence of joy and appreciation, you will never be able to see the clues that are surfacing that will give you the impetus to take action on your desired manifestation. The appearance of the right person or the unexpected gift that may be the beginning of your manifestation will be greeted with a shrug and a disinterest that will prevent you from receiving its blessing. Be awake and fully appreciative of everything and everyone.
        Change an attitude of ingratitude by imagining, just for a moment, how empty your life would be without those blessings. Often, we fail to appreciate our loved ones and all of the gifts of the universe until it is too late and they have left our lives. I think of this often in relation to my own children. I know that all too soon they will be gone from our home and living their own lives with their own primary families. I often sit in amazement, feeling how much I love each one of them. Marcelene and I make a habit of putting our arms around them, and just telling them how lucky we are that they are a part of our lives, and how privileged we feel to be their parents.
        This act of love discourages us from taking each other for granted. An expression of gratitude toward grandparents, co-workers, spouses and even the pilots flying an airplane you are on is a way out of the ennui trap. Discontinue taking life for granted. Live with an appreciation for life that cultivates gratefulness.

APPRECIATION AND DEPRECIATION

When we depreciate something, we devalue or diminish its worth. We depreciate things or people by expressing disapproval or dislike. When we appreciate something or someone, we give value with approval and praise. When we appreciate things, we mean to increase their worth.

It is impossible to feel grateful for something or someone we do not value. Begin to see things and people as they truly are rather than your assessment of them, which is an inner judgment. Each person is a child of God. See the unfolding of God in each person you meet. Then you are able to appreciate them. When you fail to do this, you depreciate them.

Your experience of misery, emptiness and fear is related to your depreciation of what shows up in your life. Think of everything that you criticize regularly and you will see where you have failed to appreciate. If you find fault with blacks or whites, Muslims or Jews, Iraqis or Americans, the young or the old, what you are doing is devaluing groups of people. The moment you participate in the depreciation process, you block your ability to experience gratitude and, consequently, you obstruct your ability to manifest prosperity, love and joy.

Essentially, the activity of depreciation means that you are not sensing the beauty of life. Rather than reinforcing the misperceptions of your ego, become an appreciator and, therefore, a manifester by seeing the Christ shining back at you in the other person or groups of people.

CULTIVATING AN ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE

Below are some suggestions for activating the practice of gratitude. Make the shift to being grateful for all that you are, and all that you have, and you will facilitate your ability to manifest into your life the essence of all that you desire.

• Develop an awareness of yourself as a recipient rather than as a victim. Virtually everything that you possess in your life is because of the efforts of others. Your furniture, automobile, home, clothes, gardens, yes, even your own body are all, in some way, gifts from others. Without those efforts of thousands and thousands of people all working in harmony, you would have nothing showing up in your life.
        Even if you are a “self-made person,” you could not have gone past the first moment of your independence without the gifts of the very basics that you used to become self-made in the first place. Just remind yourself of this fact each day and gratitude will begin replacing cynicism.
• Practice a silent expression of gratitude when you start to see your desires manifesting from the universal source. A very private, simple, “Thank you, God, I see you working in my life and I acknowledge with love my appreciation for all that you bring to me” is all that is needed. These private and firm inner reminders to be thankful will keep you from getting blocked by those obstacles you have just read about.
• Become a person who is willing to tell those around you how much you appreciate them. Make a concerted effort to say aloud how much you love your family members without making it a phony ritual. Be willing to say aloud what a lovely home you have and how much you appreciate it, or to express appreciation to someone who does your laundry or cooks a fine meal for you. Do this in a sincere fashion and you will see how quickly this attitude is reciprocated and appreciated.
        You can practice this attitude of gratitude with strangers. Do small favors like returning a shopping cart to the store rather than leaving it in the parking lot, or telling a waitress how much you appreciate her kind attention to details. The more you are willing to express gratitude, the more you are cultivating an experience of unconditional love, which, as you know, is the secret to manifesting.
• Be thankful and avoid complaining as much as possible. Remember my own personal slogan, “Don’t complain, don’t explain.” Catch yourself as you are about to find fault with someone or some condition. Then, instead, find something to say that reflects a willingness to be a love finder: “They probably haven’t been taught how to perform that task properly” rather than “No one can do anything right anymore. I don’t know what the world is coming to.”
        The more you practice not criticizing and not complaining, the more that vacuum within you will fill with love and appreciation. Give yourself a specific period of time to practice avoiding complaining and faultfinding, perhaps thirty days. You will experience the emptying of rancor and complaints from your inner self and the opening to love, appreciation and gratitude. The presence of unconditional love will lead you to the ground of yourself, where manifesting your desires becomes possible.
• Begin and end each day with an expression of gratitude and thanksgiving. Every morning when you awake you have been given the gift of a sunrise and twenty-four hours to live. This is a precious gift. You have the wonderful opportunity to take this day and live joyously, with appreciation for everything that you encounter.
        Take in a deep breath and be grateful for this exhilarating experience of breathing in life and love. Similarly, end your day with an expression of love, and a repetition of the word for peace, Shalom. That word combines the sounds of manifestation and that which has manifested for you.
• Be aware of the need to be grateful for the suffering and struggles that are part of the fabric of your life. Sometimes it is easy to simply be angry at your suffering rather than to know that it is the catalyst for your searching and awakening.
        Your ability to know the power of kindness and love most likely grew out of some darkness and pain in your past. Without those experiences you would still be stuck. Addictions teach the elixir of purity. Anger teaches the ecstasy of love. Ingratitude teaches the need for gratitude. Hoarding teaches the pleasure of giving. Your own pain taught you how to be more present and loving with others.
        Your chicken pox taught you how to avoid it later in life, by giving you the opportunity to build up antibodies in your immune system. Life gives exams! Be grateful for those exams rather than critical of them.
• Remember, it is the nature of thought to increase. The more your thoughts are centered on what is missing, the more deficient you feel and the more complaints you will utter. Similarly, the more you practice gratitude, the more you are thankful and appreciative of all that life provides and the more you feed your experience of abundance and love. The more you practice it, even in small ways, the more abundant you will feel, and, ultimately, the more you will attract to yourself as well.
        One of the things I have been doing for years is giving an expression of thanks to God whenever I find a coin, regardless of its denomination. The coin is a symbol to me of the prosperity that has been put right in my path. I have found that I receive coins almost every single day of my life. A dime here, a penny there, a nickel on the pavement. They show up regularly, almost as a reminder to me of all that has manifested in my life. I simply pick up the coin and say, “Thank you, God. I know you are working in my life and I am grateful for this symbol.” Each time I receive a coin in this manner, I am reminded to extend the favor in some form of generosity to others. It is in generosity and service to others that our gratitude will ultimately extend itself.

GENEROSITY AND SERVICE: THE FINAL STEP IN MANIFESTATION

The natural extension of being grateful is the development of a generous heart. Perfect generosity is a willingness to give of yourself and all that you have manifested without any expectation of a return. You may find it paradoxical that the final phase of manifesting your heart’s desire is to generously share what you receive and to move your attention away from what you have asked to manifest. However, if you review all of the previous principles of spiritual manifestation, you will see that this is consistent.

Manifesting is about connecting to the universal spirit, which is infinite and abundant in supply. It is not about seeing neediness in yourself, but is rather about feeling complete with that radiant abundance. It is not about craving and demanding. It is concerned with unconditional love and attracting that abundant love to your individual life. As long as you are in your physical body, you will have desires. There is nothing to be ashamed of or feel nonspiritual about. Your body and the physical needs of your material self can and will be met with abundant gifts providing that you follow these nine principles and do not let your ego take back being in charge of your life.

When you feel the presence of that abundance, your feeling of gratitude will push you in the direction of generosity. It is in the expression of your generosity that you will feel most connected to the unconditional love of the universal spirit. The more you feel a desire to share what you receive unconditionally, the more you will experience it flowing into your life.

GENEROSITY AND SELF-LIBERATION

Generosity is helpful for your own liberation in that it teaches you about the inner quality of letting go. Letting go and releasing your attachments are the most freeing things you can do to liberate yourself from the ego. A need to hang onto the things and money that you receive arises out of an inner sense of incompleteness. Practicing generosity aligns you with your sense of completeness and love.

Generosity for the sake of liberating yourself from your ego extends to more than simply sharing your material possessions. Generosity includes offering kindness, care, love and nurturing where it is needed. Furthermore, the spirit of generosity can and does ultimately relate to how we treat ourselves. If you have a generous heart that has no qualms about giving, you will treat yourself lovingly and will nurture yourself without feeling any sense of guilt.

When you can give freely, as an unconditional act of love, with no expectations, you experience what I call total freedom. You relinquish the hold of your self-absorbed ego, which encourages you to believe in limitation and competition. This ability to give without conditions is also an acknowledgment that whatever has manifested into your life has come from an infinite supply and that you can never experience a scarcity consciousness because you know that you are a part of the infinite supply.

GIVING AND RECEIVING: THE WAY THE UNIVERSE WORKS

Every single time that you take in a breath and then exhale, you are engaged in a process of giving and receiving that is vital to the material and spiritual world. With each inhalation you take in the oxygen and nitrogen that you must have in order to exist, and with each exhalation you send back the carbon dioxide that supplies the entire plant world. The cycle of generous giving and receiving is exactly the same as the very act of breathing.

Look around you and notice how everything in our universe is a result of giving and receiving. The entire food chain represents a giving of life and a taking of life, and then a giving back in an endless cycle of material manifestation. The worms that the bird eats, and the droppings from the bird, and the eating of the bird, and the recycling of the meat of the bird, and on and on it goes.

There is no place for any of it to go other than here in this universe. It does not leave and then reenter. It is all simply a process of giving and receiving different forms of energy. The iron in your bloodstream is a part of the finite supply of iron that will return in another form after your departure from the physical world, perhaps in the wings of a bat. You give of your iron supply and you take from the same supply. Giving and receiving are a natural function of life.

The natural flow of giving and receiving can be stopped by stinginess and hoarding. The process works in the same way on the spiritual level. You send out love and kindness and it returns to you tenfold. The old saying, “What goes around, comes around,” is much more than a pithy homily. It is a fact of the universe at all levels of awareness. In fact, it is what this whole business of manifesting is all about.

You put out loving energy to connect to that which you desire and it returns to you. It is a giving and receiving action. You can, however, interfere with this natural progression of give and take by selfishly hanging onto that which manifests in your material world, and stopping the flow of energy that brings abundance. This scarcity consciousness is the work of the ego, which always feels incomplete because it is convinced that it is separate from God.

CULTIVATING AN ATTITUDE OF GENEROSITY

Here are a few suggestions for putting generosity into your manifestation practice to keep the natural flow of giving and receiving moving in your life.

• Recognize that this is a way of being that definitely can be developed. You may have convinced yourself that giving is impossible because you have too little for yourself. If you are not generous when it is difficult, you will not be generous when it is easy. Generosity is a function of the heart, not the wallet.
        You can give of yourself, you can share what little you do have with those who are needier, you can tithe to those who provide you with spiritual food and ask nothing in return. A generous heart is one that places no limitations on its ability to be generous with others and does not do it for reward or recognition. You can cultivate this attitude of generosity and practice by sending love and kindness as frequently as possible each day. It will ultimately become infectious and will lead to more of your heart’s desires manifesting.
• Think of the myriad things that you do each day for others, including animals and the environment you are a part of, as ways of practicing generosity. Talking to a lonely neighbor, feeding a stray cat, opening a door, anonymously paying the toll for the car behind you, picking up your children from a lesson, vacuuming the carpet, filling the gas tank for your spouse’s car or whatever may occur in the thousands of actions you undertake each day. Remind yourself that you are practicing generosity rather than feeling ignored or unappreciated.
        Most important, remember that to give without expectation of an acknowledgment is truly the work of your higher self. The ego needs and demands credit as often as possible, and with a great deal of fanfare as well. Keep your generosity practices private, without needing to boast about your great generous spirit.
• Become aware of the internal resistances that arise within you when you have an impulse to give. Your fear of not having enough for yourself and your family, your doubts about whether others are truly needy, your self-consciousness or embarrassment, the fact that others won’t appreciate it anyway or perhaps will only ask for more are impulses that you need to honor as valid. All of these inner doubts and fears should be examined without judgment. They all represent a part of your own conditioned response to generosity.
        When you give for the sake of having a generous spirit and extending love, and for no other reason, then those inner doubts will fade away. I am often criticized when I give money on the street to an obvious drug addict. When my critic says, “They are only going to buy more drugs with that money,” my response is, “What they do with the money has nothing to do with why I gave them the money. This one human being connecting to another in a spirit of love might be that single act of kindness and generosity that will bring them closer to God, where genuine healing takes place.”
• Give yourself designated times and periods of time to practice being generous, particularly in offering service or in giving of your time.
        I sometimes notice my young son out playing soccer by himself, kicking the ball and wishing in his heart that he had someone to play with. I remind myself to forget about the zillion things that I have to do, my state of fatigue, my desire to watch a video or whatever, and I designate the next several hours to simply sharing my time with him. It is not because I am so magnanimous but because it is my opportunity to practice being generous with my time and my love. It also provides me with the glorious opportunity to do something I really love, which is to be with my boy, whom I love dearly.
• Practice being able to receive. Accept help when others offer it. Allow others to do for you without feeling embarrassed or without feeling that your independence is threatened. Remember that giving and receiving are the natural interplay of the energy of the universe. It is the very source of your manifestation practice.
        If you turn off the receiving side, you cut the natural flow of energy just as if you turned off the giving side. Practice saying “Thank you, I appreciate your help” even if your independent ego says “I didn’t really need it.” Receiving is very much a component of the spiritual practice of manifestation, and you can work at allowing this into your life with gratitude and love.
• Catch yourself at the specific moment of your scarcity consciousness and use this moment to work on your new generosity. When you are perceiving scarcity, your immediate inclination is to hoard, but following through by hoarding only amplifies the effects of your feeling stingy and fearful.
        This might involve something as simple as tipping beyond what is expected, or it might involve extending love or a compliment to those on whom you practice your scarcity behavior. In these moments, work on your highest self, which wants you to experience joy and peace and extend a bit of unaccustomed generosity. Remind yourself that a generous spirit infuses the mind with joy and strength. This is precisely how you will feel when you have overcome your conditioned response of hoarding and stinginess.
• Practice giving just a bit more than you think you can, and a bit more than your own comfort level allows. Increase your patience with a child, hold your spouse in a passionate embrace for just a bit longer than a superficial squeeze, give an extra dollar or two to the maid who took care of you during your hotel visit.
        Whatever you have convinced yourself is the limit of your generosity, try going beyond it, knowing full well that it is not going to cause any great hardship in your life. Know, too, that it will give you that sense of spiritual fulfillment that makes you feel more Godlike and which is actually putting you in touch with your highest self.
        You can practice a little bit more generosity with yourself than you are normally accustomed to. Order the item on the menu that costs a bit more, or give yourself a few extra days on your vacation trip, or allow yourself the luxury of a body massage or a facial.

EXTENDING YOUR GENEROSITY INTO SERVICE AS A WAY OF LIFE

We all live in this world with other people, and our encounters and relationships with them are a central component and influence on ourselves and each other. “Service” is a word that is not commonly thought of as a part of our way of being in ordinary relationships. Service simply cannot be separated from relationships. We will all benefit from making this a conscious activity of our everyday lives in relationship to God, our fellow human beings, our environment and ourselves.

Millions of fibers connect us to our fellow human beings, and our actions connect us via these fibers to all others on our planet. When you cultivate an attitude of gratitude and generosity, you will find yourself wanting to be in the service of others. You will find it natural to extend that which you receive into the service of others as well.

If you receive a great teaching, you will want to teach it to others. If you receive love, you will wish to extend that love unconditionally outward. Your relationships will automatically be felt as gifts for the service of others.

When you contemplate the purpose of your life in the material plane, you will discover that the only thing you can do with this life is to give it away. You cannot hang onto anything in a constantly changing universe. You cannot lay claim to anything. It is all transitory. The only part of you that is permanent is the part that is unchanging, and that is the spiritual essence that resides in an unseen dimension. You will find your purpose and your strength when you see that you are in a relationship with all other living things, and that you are purposeful and peaceful when you serve in some capacity.

The very purpose of manifesting is to serve more fully and to leave ego-dominated self-absorption behind. Your well-being, which is the purpose of your manifesting practice, is genuinely and inextricably connected to the lives and well-being of others. Essentially, your own interests are inseparable from someone else’s interests.

It is out of this state of recognizing our fundamental interconnectedness that we realize we are all in a constant state of service to each other. It is this awareness that you want to keep uppermost in your mind as you generate this principle of spiritual manifesting.

Service at its very basic core is an inner choice to offer a helpful and healing attitude to others as well as to ourselves. A natural outgrowth of feeling grateful for our daily life manifestations is experiencing the inclination to be generous. Gratitude, generosity and an awareness of service as our purpose are the fundamental tenets of this last principle.

By turning the purpose of your life into one of service and leaving behind your self-absorption, you discover the irony of manifesting. The more you choose to be of service, the more profoundly you experience unconditional love, and the more you find materializing into your life.

Service is best thought of as a continual focus in your life rather than being limited to certain kinds of giving activities and the sharing in relationships. Service is a state of mind that expresses love rather than fear, and trust rather than distrust. It is focusing on meeting all others as equals with whom we share a spiritual identity. This inner attitude of love reveals itself in action.

When I accept a speaking engagement, I want to be love revealing itself in action, generously sharing what I have been given. I find that when I am about to address a large audience the best way for me to get outside my ego, which is focused on its own rewards, such as applause, making money and receiving awards, is to meditate for an hour before my talk. The mantra I repeat during my meditation is “How may I serve?” Over and over I say these words to myself until they blend into a peaceful inner countenance. When I go on stage to speak, my attention is focused on serving and is not caught by my ego. In this state of mind I enjoy a loving guidance that supports me in serving those who are in the audience.

Service does not require that you become a Mother Teresa. You serve by suspending your ego and extending the love that now fills that space. It can take a million different forms, but when practiced with authenticity, from the heart, it makes all that has manifested into your life appear worthwhile.

The only problem that you will encounter with a service approach to your life is in attempting to give or serve without love. The moment that you put a condition on your service, or ask something in return, or expect your extension of the offer to serve to be returned with the appropriate thank-you response, you introduce conditional rather than unconditional love. The imposition of the condition makes service empty.

If you are going to serve, ask yourself if you can love the human being you are serving. If you cannot, then do not give lovelessly but simply pass and send them a silent blessing. If you feel someone is panhandling simply out of laziness and work avoidance, and this is your heartfelt feeling, then do not give. Service without love is obligation, and it carries guilt and anger and resentment along with it. Work at being in a state of unconditional love with your service efforts, and when love is not authentically present, acknowledge that as well.

 

This concludes the ninth principle of spiritual manifesting. Be willing to take all that is attracted to you as a result of your practicing the manifesting principles, and then turn right around and in a spirit of gratitude and generosity devote yourself to an act of service. The more you practice in this light, the more you will see the objects of your desire coming to fruition regularly. There need be no conflict between your spiritual awareness of wanting to serve and the presence of desires within you. As Rumi observed almost a millennium ago, “People who renounce desires often turn, suddenly, into hypocrites!”

You do have desires, both on a material level and in terms of becoming more spiritually loving and generous in the service of others. There need be no conflict.

I want to close this final principle with another observation by Rumi titled “The Servant Who Loved His Prayers.” It sums up all that I have written, not only here in this final principle on gratitude, generosity and service, but in this entire book. Read the words carefully, and as you close the book and go to work on your own spiritual manifestation program, reread this passage by Jalaluddin Rumi, who was born in the year 1207 in the Persian Empire in what is now called Afghanistan. It will remind you of your role in all of this, a role that is only limited by the restrictions you place on your spiritual awareness.

The Servant Who Loved His Prayers

At dawn a certain rich man

wanted to go to the steambaths.

He woke his servant, Sunqur,

“Ho! Get Moving! Get the basin

and the towels and the clay for washing

and let’s go to the baths.”

Sunqur immediately collected what was needed,

and they set out side by side along the road.

As they passed the mosque, the call to prayer sounded.

Sunqur loved his five-times prayer.

“Please, master,

rest on this bench for a while that I may recite sura 98,

which begins,

‘You who treat your slave with kindness.’”

The master sat on the bench outside while Sunqur went in.

When prayers were over, and the priest and all the worshipers

had left, still Sunqur remained inside. The master waited

and waited. Finally he yelled into the mosque, “Sunqur,

why don’t you come out?”

“I can’t. This clever one

won’t let me. Have a little more patience.

I hear you out there.”

Seven times the master waited,

and then shouted. Sunqur’s reply was always the same,

“Not yet. He won’t let me come out yet.”

“But there’s no one

in there but you. Everyone else has left.

Who makes you sit still so long?”

“The one who keeps me in here is the one

who keeps you out there.

The same who will not let you in will not let me out.”

The ocean will not allow its fish out of itself.

Nor does it let land animals in

where the subtle and delicate fish move.

The land creatures lumber along on the ground.

No cleverness can change this. There’s only one

opener for the lock of these matters.

Forget your figuring. Forget your self. Listen to your Friend.

When you become totally obedient to that one,

you’ll be free.

May you always swim in the ocean of abundance while manifesting your own divine destiny. Listen to your friend.