. These are places not where you’re bad, but
where you’re wounded. Yet our wounds do not necessarily look like
wounds to other people; they’re more likely to appear as character defects
that only set us up for further pain. All of us have character defects, of course. But salvation lies in our
willingness to change the way we are, not in the endless analysis about why
we are the way we are. At a certain point, you don’t keep trying to
understand why you’re needy, negative, controlling, or manipulative. You
simply realize you are, admit you are, and ask God to change you. Dear God,
I know I am harsh wher e I would be gentle, weak wher e I should be str ong, judgmental wher e
I should be mer ciful. I am willing to change. Please show me how. Amen
Scan your perso nality as though you are looking at yourself from above. See how you manifest to the world, and ask yourself honestly how you
come across to others. Reflect on the fact that the life you’re  living is a
result of the person you’ve become. Who we are in the world is based on moment-by-moment decisions. Every moment we decide, consciously or unconsciously, whether to face
life with an open or closed heart. Whether to embrace the innocence inothers and express lovingly, or to constrict in defensiveness, judgment, and
unprocessed pain. Fake it till you make it means practice till it’s real. And
what we find when we do something like that is that doing something
makes  it real. I have a friend named Kathy who comes from Geor gia, and she has a
way of addressin g almost all her friends as “My love.” One day I decided to
do that too, and it was amazing the changes I felt as I did. Coming from
Texas, I was already big on calling people “Darling”—sort of longish for
the “Darlin’” I had grown up around—but “My love” took things to another
place. I don’t know if I’ve kept it up, but I know I felt a shift when I did it. It’s hard to snap at someone when you’re calling them “My love.”
Words are not just an expressio n of thought; they also create thought. And every thought we think takes us, and those around us, straight to
heaven or straight to hell. Accor ding to A Course in Miracles, heaven isn’t a
condition or a place, but an awareness of our oneness. And hell is the state
of anxiety that results when we feel separate from others. Neither happen
after we die; they happen in any moment. Every thought takes us in some
way closer to the awareness of our oneness or to the anxiety of feeling
separate and alone. Again, this isn’t about what we get from others. We only
get what we choose to give away. Deciding who we choose to be in any moment is more import ant than
any other decision, because it determines all others and influences all
others. If I think of myself as a victim, I will behave as a victim and come
across as a victim. If I think of myself as less than, I will behave in ways
that are less than and I will appear that way to others. If I judge others, I
will behave in ways that of fend them and thus keep love at bay. Yet all these deadly games begin to grow old after a while, not only to
us but to those around us. I can think of few more cringe-filled experiences
than looking around and realizing that people find you pathetic—or worse. This might be the moment when you realize that your way isn’t
working. When you grow sick and tired of being sick and tired. That’ s often
when people fall to their knees, looking for an escape from their habitual
patterns of self-sabotage and pain. Such a moment,  of course, is not a eureka experience that autom atically
changes everything. Simply knowing that we need to change doesn’ t
necessarily mean we know how to. Often our emotional muscles have
congealed around mental habits that formed so long ago we can’t evenremember their source. They then burrowed into our subconscious mind
and continue to dictate our thoughts and behavior. When I was growing up, the entrances into many areas of power were
still closed to women that are not closed now. It felt as though we had to
grow claws on our fingernails in order to make our way into rooms that
were much easier for men to enter. What I found—a nd I think this is true of many women around my age—
is that even when the doors had been opened and I no longer needed my
claws, it was as though they’d  become cemented into my fingernails. A
certain harshnes s in my personality had become a mental habit, like an
emotional muscle that seemed permanently cramped. I imagined opponents
who weren’t even there, then suffered the consequences of treating people
as though they were. For where we don’t extend love, we project fear. We
are subconsciou sly setting people up to become who we’ve already decided
they were. The ego doesn’ t deny your suffering. It simply says other peop le are to
blame for it—which then maintains the separation, as people keep
appearing in your life to consta ntly disappoint you. What the ego doesn’ t
want you to see are all the subco nscious and brilliant ways you set them up
to do that. Spiritual rebirth  is not an easy process; like physical birth, it can be
messy and difficult. It takes brutal self-honesty to recognize the parts of us
that need to die. First we come to see that a pattern is ego, that it’s dysfunctio nal and
doesn’ t serve us. But that doesn’ t mean it necessarily goes away, that it
immediately stops. If anything, the pattern sometimes seems to become
more prevalent, more obvious, as though the Holy Spirit puts a magnifying
glass onto that aspect of our personality so we have no choice but to attend
to it. This is why it often feels as though once you get serious about the
spiritual path, things can seem  to get worse before they get better. Your
character defects  were operative before, but you were sort of anesthetized to
them, able to get by with pretending they weren’ t much of an issue. But
once we do admit we have them, the work begins. You still might behave in
a dysfunctional way, but you can no longer pretend to yourself that you’re
not doing so.The fact that we’re admitting our issues is a good thing, but the ego is
very sly here. The ego loves to talk about itself and thoroughly  enjoys this
part of the proce ss. It doesn’ t mind you owning your shadow, so long as you
blame someone else for why you are the way you are. Contrary to the psychotherapeut ic trend, it doesn’ t really matter how our
neurotic patterns  got started. Some say they started with Mommy or Daddy,
or with social or ancestral patterns, and all that might be true. But
metaphysically it all started millions of years ago with the first thought of
separation. All that’s happened since then is that we keep repeating it. What
matters is not where the fear came from, but that it’s lodged in your brain. And analyzing the darkness doesn’ t necessarily turn on the light. At a certain point it doesn’ t really matter where you got your issues. They’re yours now. And no matter who your parents were, you can be
reparented by God. Your parents birthed your mortal self; God Himself
birthed the real you. We don’t heal our lives in the past but in the present. We’re not held
back by the love we didn’ t receive in the past but by the love we’re refusing
to give right now. In this moment, we can make a better choice. But that’s
not alwa ys easy, and sometimes it takes more than simply positive thinking. Sometimes it’s not enough to just tell ourselves to act differently. Sometimes we need God’ s help. And lo and behold, He is always there. OceanofPDF.comPositively You
The ego is simply a false belief, but beliefs—particularly unrecognized
beliefs—are very powerful. The ego is the power of your mind turned
against you, in opposition to who you truly are. The ego will use any scrap of evidence with which to prosecute its case
against you: you’re too average, too poor, too boring, too uneducated, too
unpopular, too young, too old, or whatever else might prove your
unworthiness. If you’re  skirtin g failure, it will appear as a fear of failure. It will tell
you what a loser you are and make you too afraid to keep trying. If you’re skirting success, it will appear as a fear of success. It will set
you up for a fall by telling you that you know more than you actually do. If you’re in a relationship, it will appear as a fear of intimacy. It will tell
you it’ s unsafe to be vulnerable and will create barriers to deep relationship. If you’re not in a relationship, it will make you cynical. It will tell you
that you’ll never find someone and there aren’ t any good people out there
anyway. The ego will


 of the vital forces of your subconscious mind throug hout
your system. This can be done by eliminating thoughts of fear, worry,
anxiety, jealousy, hatred, and every other destructive thought w hich
tends to tear down and destroy your nerves and glands—body tissue
which controls the elimina-tion of all waste material. • Pott’s disease cured
In the Nautilus magazine of March, 1917, there appears an article
about a boy suffering from Pott’s disease, or tuber-culosis of the
spine, who had a remarkable healing. His name was Frederick El ias
Andrews of Indianapolis, now minister of Unity School of
Christianity, Kansas City, Missouri. His physician pronounced h im
 92  incurable. He began to pray, and from a crooked, twisted cripple going
about on hands and knees, he be-came a strong, straight, well-forme d
man. He created his own affirmation, mentally absorbing the quali ties
he needed. He affirmed over and over again many times a day, “I am whole,
perfect, strong, powerful, loving, harmonious, and happy.” He
persevered and said that this prayer was the last utterance on his li ps at
night and the first in the morning. He prayed for others also by
sending out thoughts of love and health. This attitude of mind and way
of prayer returned to him multiplied many times. His faith a nd
perseverance paid off with big dividends. When thoughts of fea r,
anger, jealousy, or envy drew his attention, he would immediately
start his counteracting force of affirmation going in his mi nd. His
subconscious mind responded according to the nature of his habitual
thinking. This is the meaning of the statement in the Bible, Go thy
way, thy faith hath made thee whole. MARK 10:52. • How faith in your subconscious powers makes you whole
A young man, who came to my lectures on the healing power of the
subconscious mind, had severe eye trouble, which his doctor said
necessitated an operation. He said to himself, “My subconscious  made
my eyes, and it can heal me.”
Each night, as he went to sleep, he entered into a drowsy, meditati ve
state, the condition akin to sleep. His attention was immobili zed and
focused on the eye doctor. He imagined the doctor was in front of
him, and he plainly heard, or imagined he heard, the doctor saying to
him, “A miracle has happened!” He heard this over and over agai n
every night for perhaps five minutes or so before going to sle ep. At
the end of three weeks he again went to the ophthalmologist who had
previously examined his eyes, and the physician said to this man,
“This is a miracle!”
What happened? This man impressed his subconscious mind using
the doctor as an instrument or a means of convincing it or conveying
the idea. 93  Through repetition, faith, and expect-ancy he impregnated his
subconscious mind. His subconscious mind made his eye; within it
was the perfect pattern, and imme-diately it proceeded to heal the eye. This is another example of how faith in the healing power of your
subconscious can make you whole. • Pointers to review
1. Your subconscious is the builder of your body and is on the job
24 hours a day. You interfere with its life-giving patterns by negative
thinking. 2. Charge your subconscious with the task of evolving an an-swer t o
any problem, prior to sleep and it will answer you. 3. Watch your thoughts. Every thought accepted as true is sent by
your brain to your solar plexus—your abdominal brain—and is
brought into your world as a reality. 4. Know that you can remake yourself by giving a new blue-print  to
your subconscious mind. 5. The tendency of your subconscious is always lifeward. Your job
is with your conscious mind. Feed your subconscious mind with
premises, which are true. Your subconscious is always repr oducing
according to your habitual mental pat-terns. 6. You build a new body every eleven months. Change your body
by changing your thoughts and keeping them changed. 7. It is normal to be healthy. It is abnormal to be ill. There is within
the innate principle of harmony. 8. Thoughts of jealousy, fear, worry, and anxiety tear down and
destroy your nerves and glands bringing about mental and physical
diseases of all kinds. 9. What you affirm consciously and feel as true will be made
manifest in your mind, body and affairs. Affirm the good and enter
into the joy of living. 94  8
How to Get the Results You Want
The principle reasons for failure are: Lack of confidence and too
much effort. Many people block answers to their pray-ers by  failing to
fully comprehend the workings of their subcon-scious mind. When
you know how your mind functions, you gain a measure of
confidence. You must remember whenever your subconscious mind
accepts an idea; it immediately begins to execute it. It uses all its
mighty resources to that end and mobilizes all the mental and s piritual
laws of your deeper mind. This law is true for good or bad idea s.
Consequently, if you use it negatively, it brings trouble, failure, and
confusion. When you use it constructively, it brings guidance,
freedom, and peace of mind. The right answer is inevitable when your thoughts are posi-ti ve,
constructive, and loving. From this it is perfectly obvious that  the only
thing you have to do in order to overcome failure is to get your
subconscious to accept your idea or request by feeling it s reality now,
and the law of your mind will do the rest. Turn over your request w ith
faith and confidence, and your subconscious will take over and answer
for you. You will always fail to get results by trying to use ment al
coercion— your subconscious mind does not respond to coer-cion, it
responds to your faith or conscious mind acceptance. Your failure to get results may also arise from such state-m ents as:
“Things are getting worse.” “I will never get an an-swe r.” “I see no
way out.” “It is hopeless.” “I don’t know what to do.” “I’m all mi xed
up.” When you use such statements, you get no response or co-
operation from your subconscious mind. Like a soldier marking tim e,
you neither go forward nor back-ward; in other words, you don’t get
anywhere. 95  If you get into a taxi and give half dozen different direc-t ions to the
driver in five minutes, he would become hopelessly confused and
probably would refuse to take you anywhere. It is the same whe n
working with your subconscious mind. There must be a clear-cut idea
in your mind. You must arrive at the definite decision that ther e is a
way out, a solution to the vexing problem in sickness. Only the
infinite intelligence within your subconscious knows the answer. When you come to that clear-cut conclusion in your conscious mind,
your mind is then made up, and according to your belief is it done
unto you. • Easy does it
A house owner once remonstrated with a furnace repairman for
charging two hundred dollars for fixing the boiler. The me-chanic
said, “I charged five cents for the missing bolt and one hund red
ninety-nine dollars and ninety-five cents for knowing what was
wrong.”
Similarly, your subconscious mind is the master mechanic, the al l-
wise one, who knows ways and means of healing any or-gan of your
body, as well as your affairs. Decree health, and your subconsciou s
will establish it, but relaxation is the key. “Easy does it.” Do not be
concerned with details and means, but know the end result. Get th e
feel of the happy solution to your problem whether it is health,
finances, or employment. Remember how you felt after you had
recovered from a severe state of illness. Bear in mind that your  feeling
is the touchstone of all subconscious demonstration. Your new idea
must be felt subjectively in a finished state, not the futur e, but as
coming about now. • Infer no opponent, use imagination and not will power
In using your subconscious mind you infer no opponent, you use no
will power. You imagine the end and the freedom state. You will fin d
your intellect trying to get in the way, but persist in maint aining a
simple, childlike, miracle-making faith. Picture yourself without the
ailment or problem. Imagine the emotional accompaniment of the
 96  freedom state you crave. Cut out all red tape from the process. The
simple way is the best. • How disciplined imagination works wonders
A wonderful way to get a response from your subconscious mind is
through disciplined or scientific imagination. As previ-ously p ointed
out, your subconscious mind is the builder of the body and control s all
its vital functions. The Bible says, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believ-ing, ye
shall receive. To believe is to accept something as true, or to live in
the state of being it. As you sustain this mood, you shall experienc e
the joy of the answered prayer


 is spread all over and is nullified. Along this line, it is obvious that if one is
using spot heat treatment a bath should not be taken within an hour or so before or
after, also that the bath water should be onl y slightly warm. In general very hot baths
are injurious because they upset the body's alarm signal system and wash too much
valuable oil out of the skin. In hot water treatment it is of no value to add epsom salt or anything else to the
water, as heat alone is what does the work. In the absence of special instructions from
the doctor, ordinarily the application of heat for fifteen to thirty minutes twice or three
times a day is enough if it is done regularly every day. Very long treatment periods
tend to cause exhaustion. There is always a possibility of causing bur ns in heat treatment, and it is a good plan
to keep one hand clear of the heat and feel the treated area once in a while to see if it
is getting too hot. Otherwise, you may get so used to the heat you do not realize you
are being burned. Persons with unclear minds should always have supervision when
heat is used, and special care taken with he ating pads around beds, due to fire danger. Heat lamps are too dangerous to use. It is wise to adopt the fresh food diet for about two weeks before using heat for
arterial problems, to strengthen the body and lessen the danger of complications
arising. Massage and vibration of arteriosclerotic bodies is dangerous due to the likelihood
of causing blood clots to form or break loose, and also is of no benefit. Likewise
violent exertion, strenuous exercise, or excitement should be avoided. As Dr. Paul Dudley White has stressed, conservati ve regular exercise is beneficial. 29. EATING AND DRINKING HABITS
   If one drinks fluids when eating solid foods the digestive juices are diluted,
resulting in poor digestive action which impairs general health and leads to
indigestion, ulcers, colitis, and bowel problems. It is unnatural and harmful to drink any kind of fluid with solid food. One should not drink any beverage, even water, for about 1/2 hour before a meal,
during the meal, or for about 1 hour after a meal. At other times drink all the water or approved beverages desired. Be sure to dri nk plenty of water between meals, a good
plan being to drink a large glassful upon arising in the morning, and at least two more through the day. If one finds it hard to eat without drinking, mealtime beverages may be rationed
down a little at a time over a period of several days rather than quit all at once. The
jaws will quickly grow stronger and saliva glands will become more active, so that in
a few days one will enjoy eating solid food without a beverage. Food will taste better
and one will feel better very quickly. 30. MEAT EATING HABITS
   When eating meat do not eat the white gristle off the bones and do not eat the
fibrous streaks which lie around and between the sections of solid meat and fat,
because these parts often contain a great deal  of the hardened atherosclerosis material
from stale feeds which the animal was fed. In making soup or stew, these parts and the bones should be trimmed out before cooking, except in the case of wild game or
meat from animals which were fed very little stale grain or commercial feed. Fat can be very nourishing and healthful, but should only be eaten if it is normal
healthy fat. Good fat is slightly translucent, soft and springy, has a melting quality in
the mouth and a sweet delicious taste. Unfortunately commercial meat often has bad
fat, full of deteriorated hardened materials. It is opaque to light, hard and crumbly in
texture, has a chalky or plaster like appearance, does not melt in the mouth and
sometimes sticks to the mouth, and has a flat rancid taste. Meat gravy should be eaten if it is not thickened with flour or starch and if it comes
from fresh meat with reasonably good fat. If it tastes rancid, scorched, or feels sticky
and gummy in the mouth, don't eat it. 31. INDIGESTION, BOWEL PROBLEMS, AND ULCERS
   The fresh food diet and improved eating practices usually have a prompt helpful
effect on digestive troubles. Some fruits, vegetables, and nuts tend to have a laxative or even an allergic reaction
in some individuals. So if after a few trials it is found that a particular food causes a
bowel upset or stomach ache, that item should be avoided in the future, or try eating
less of it a time. Fruit often rides better on top of other food rather than on an empty
stomach. In any case do not tolerate loose bowels occurring over an extended period of time,
because this condition is very weakening. Seek help from your doctor. In general,
some people with sensitive or ulcerated stomachs cannot tolerate raw fruits and vegetables, so have to eat these items cooked. 32. WHERE THE HOUSEWIFE REIGNS SUPREME
   The wise housewife knows that she can exploit the world only through her husband
and children, that she will prosper and enjoy the good life mainly through their
earnings and achievements. She wields an awesome power for good or ill, for to a
large degree she has the choice of whether she will feed her family for fame and fortune or bring ruin upon them all with poor stale food. Starting early enough, she
can through improved food practices do much to obtain a happy prosperous life, to
enjoy a successful loving husband through a long lifetime, and to have strong
beautiful children who will be a joy to her. True beauty and charm come from eating high quality fresh foods, in a far more
bountiful way than from cosmetics and beauty treatments. It takes good food to grow
abundant richly colored shining hair and eyelashes, bring sparkle to the eyes and grace to the figure. Peace of mind and contentment also require proper food and many
a case of "nerves" is only the body telling us that it is poorly nourished. And it is
never too late to start, for we are all better than we realize, and you never know what
you can do until you try. The burden of selecting and preparing the daily food traditionally falls on the
housewife, and few men realize what a time-consuming job it is to prepare and clean
up after two or three meals a day. Families should understand that mother is not a servant, and every one who eats at the table should at least help clear away after the
meal is over, and do other things for her like take out the rubbish and wash the pail. By following the improved cooking and dietary principles described herein, the
housewife can greatly decrease her work load, save money and provide her family
better food which will prevent arteriosclerosis and give her loved ones the
nourishment they need to go out and make their mark in the world. The great Sir Winston Churchill often said that his good wife Clem-mie deserved
most of the credit for his accomplishments, for her unfailing zeal in seeing that he got
the best of food and care throughout his long and energetic career. Dear old Winnie,
considerate as well as intelligent, spoke truer than even he knew, for behind nearly
every man who accomplishes much is a good wife or a good mother who has given him the nourishment which is his only source of strength and energy. Never forget that food makes the man, and the woman as well. 33. COOKING
   To prevent arteriosclerosis and build up the health, food should be selected
according to the diet chart and cooked as follows:
 DO  DON'T
Cooking methods are here listed
with the safest first. 1. No cooking. As many foods
as possible should be eaten raw,
with the exception of fish and
meat which should be cooked to
destroy any possible parasites. 2. Boiling, steaming (not under
pressure) called "vapor cooking." 3. Roasting or broiling under
foil or a cover. Don't fry food in cooking oil or
shortening. Don't use any flour, meal, or
crumbs as a batter, dip, dusting, thickening or any other way. Try to avoid excessive
browning of food. Browned food is semicharred, and can cause
both arteriosclerosis and cancer. Don't broil or bake without a
cover or foil over the food to hold
in the moisture and prevent
browning. Don't use pressure cooking. HOW TO COOK BETTER WITH LESS WORK
   When food is cooked by methods which expose it to hot grease, hot dry air, or
smoke, it is usually heated far hotter than necessary to cook it. Frying, griddle or pan
broiling, oven roasting and oven broiling produce browning because of this excessive
heat. Browning is an oxidative chemical reaction caused by heat, which produces
toxins and fatty rubbish capable of causing both cancer and choked arteries, as well as
indigestion and loss of nutritional value. It  wastes food, wastes heat, and undermines
your health. Charcoal broiling is even wo rse, because here the food soaks up toxic
fumes from the charcoal plus foul fumes of burned grease dripping on the coals in
addition to the overheating and browning. We have recently learned that toxins in
smoke act directly on the heart, and in people with weak tired hearts can cause
irregular


 at a furious pace and with
powerful eﬀects everywhere in your body, is coordinated by
the brain, which uses the pituitary gland to guide many of
the hormonal signals just described, not to mention various
other chemical signals that go racing down your neurons to
focus your eyes, prick up your ears, jerk your back muscles
upright, and swivel your head in alarm. To make this whole react ion happen and then to make it
go away again (for the body, unlike a man-made drug,
knows how to reverse every one of these processes just as
neatly as it began), the same key-in-the-lock mechanism is
employed everywhere. It is all so deceptively simple, yet if
you attempt to duplicate this event with a drug, the results
are nowhere near as precise, orderly, and beautifully
orchestrated. In fact, they are chaotic. Injecting adrenaline,
insulin, or glucose separa tely into the body gives it a crude
jolt. The chemicals immediately ﬂood all the receptor sites
without coordination from the brain. Instead of talking to
the body, they assault it with single-minded insistence. Even though the chem ical make-up of adrenaline is
identical no matter where it is derived, the critical
ingredient of intelligence must be present; other wise, the
drug’s action is a mockery of the real thing. Here is a related example to show the complicated
results of giving a drug that seems simple. Hypertension
patients are generally told to bring down their elevated
blood pressure with diuretics—drugs that take water from
the cells and pass it out of the system through urination. This is exactly what the kidneys do all the time as they
delicately monitor your blood chemistry to make sure that
the balance of water, waste products, and the necessary
salts, or electrolytes, is precisely maintained. A diuretic,
however, has only one idea in mind, and obsessed with that
one idea, it careens through the body, demanding, “Water! Water!” from every cell it meets.The result is that the ﬂuid tension in the blood vessels is
reduced, which is what the doctor wants to happen, but the
water level everywhere else is aﬀected at the same time. The brain may be forced to give up some of its water, which
under normal conditions it does only in the direst
emergency, causing the patient to feel dizzy and drowsy. In
many cases nothing more  serious happens, but sometimes
other brain functions may also then be thrown oﬀ,
especially in older patients: if they happen to drink alcohol,
even in moderation, these people can become so confused
that they forget to drink  enough water or to eat properly. This can lead to malnutrition combined with severe
dehydration. In the view of some endocrinologists, the
dehydration induced by diuretics in the presence of alcohol
or tranquilizers is the leading cause of death among older
Americans. All of these consequences, whether mild or severe, are
usually called the undesirable “side eﬀects” of diuretics,
but that is not an accurate name. They are just its eﬀects—
the good and bad ones necessarily come together in the
same package. A diuretic basically work s by latching onto
sodium atoms, causing the body to discard excess  salt, and
this in turn indirectly brings down the water level in the
tissues, since  water is bound up with salt in our bodies, just
as in sea water. The diuretic cannot help it if too much salt
is taken where water is still needed. Since potassium is
close to sodium in its atomic structure, the diuretic also
causes it to be depleted, leading to weakness, fatigue, and
leg cramps. (Less-adverse eﬀects are generally noticed by
the leaching  of other trace elements, such as zinc and
magnesium.) Besides these common signs of potassium
deﬁciency, there can be other complications—digitalis, the
drug commonly given to heart patients to strengthen their
weak heartbeat, becomes more toxic if the body is low on
potassium. Ironically, a potassium deﬁciency is nowsuspected to be a causal link in high blood pressure, which
means that the diuretic may be promoting the very
condition it was meant to cure. The frustrating reality, as far as medical researchers are
concerned, is that we already know that the living body is
the best pharmacy ever devised. It produces diuretics,
painkillers, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, antibiotics, and
indeed everything manufactured by the drug companies,
but it makes them much, much better. The dosage is always
right and given on time; side eﬀects are minimal or
nonexistent; and the directions for using the drug are
included in the drug itself, as part of its built-in
intelligence. —
Thinking about these well-known facts has led me to three
conclusions. First, that intelligence is present everywhere
in our bodies. Second, that our own inner intelligence is far
superior to any we can try to substitute from the outside. Third, that intelligence is more important than the actual
matter of the body, since without it, that matter would be
undirected, formless, and chaotic. Intelligence makes the
diﬀerence between a house designed by an architect and a
pile of bricks. For the moment, let’s keep our deﬁnition of the word
intelligence  as simple and practica l as possible. Rather
than referring to the intelligence of a genius, which may
seem both exalted and abstract, I deﬁne it simply as “know-
how.” There is no doubt, whatever you think about
intelligence in the abstract, that the body must be credited
with an immense fund of know-how. The body’s inner intelligence is so powerful that when it
goes awry, the physician is faced with a truly formidable
antagonist. Every cell in the body is programmed by itsDNA, for example, to divide at a certain rate, producing
two new cells after the mother cell splits in half. Like
everything else regulated by our inner intelligence, this
process is not purely mechanical. A cell divides in response
to its own internal need combined with signals generated
from the cells around it, the brain, the faraway organs that
are “talking” to it via chemical messages. Cell division is a
carefully considered and well-thought-out decision—except
in the case of cancer. Cancer is wild, anti-social behavior, whereby a single cell
reproduces itself without check, heeding no signals from
anywhere except, apparently, its own demented DNA. Why
this occurs, no one know s. It is a good bet that the body
itself knows how to reverse the process, but for some
reason, equally unknow n to science, it doesn’t always
succeed. It is only a matter of time, once the process
begins, before the cancer cells overwhelm a vital organ,
crowd out its normal cells, and cause death. When the ﬁnal
crisis comes, the cancer  cells perish with the rest of the
body, doomed by their ungoverned appetite for self-
expansion. Medicine has so far not ﬁgured out a way to send a
message to the cancer cells in time to ward oﬀ the tragic
fate they have created. The chemicals a physician might
use against cancer are not at all eﬀective on the level of
intelligence. Cancer is endowed with mad genius, while
drugs are simple-minded. So the oncologist resort s to a
much cruder assault, a form of poisoning. The anti-cancer
drug that is administere d is generally toxic to the entire
body, but because cancer cells are growing at a much
faster rate than normal cells, they ingest more of the
poison and die oﬀ ﬁrst. The whole strategy is a calculated
risk. The patient must be fortunate; his physician must be
extremely knowledgeable about the dosage and timing of
the chemotherapy, both of which are absolutely vital. Thenthe cancer may be defea ted, adding years of useful life to
the patient’s existence. Ironically, the therapy may fail because it strips the body
of the very intelligence that usually guards it from  disease. Many anti-cancer drugs are extremely damaging to the
body’s immune system; they directly suppress the bone
marrow, which manufa ctures our white cells, with
devastating eﬀect on the white-cell count in the blood. As
the course of chemotherapy continues, the patient  becomes
more and more susceptib le to new forms of cancer, and in a
certain numb er of cases—as high as 30 percent for breast
cancer—new cancer appears and the patient dies. Moreover, it is sometimes not statistically possible to kill
every malign ant cell. It has been estimated that a typical
cancer patient may have 10 billion cancer cells. If his
chemotherapy is 99.99 percent eﬀective, there would still
be 1 million survivors, more than enough to start over
again. Cancer cells are not created equal; some are hardier than
others and therefore more diﬀicult to kill. It may be that
destroying the weaker cells acts as a kind of Darwinian
selection, leaving the ﬁttest to survive. In that case,
chem


direct advantage of this. I drew  bliss as a circle to
represent a constant, unbroken signal. However, there can
be breaks in the circle. These occur when the DNA, the
mind, and the body are not perfectly synchronized. Ayurveda would say that many diseases begin where there
is such a break—bliss slips out of its groove, so to speak,
throwing oﬀ the cell’s intelligence. To repair the break, a
speciﬁc signal needs to be inserted back into the circle—a
primordial sound. In this way, a vibration is used to cure a
vibration. —
Treating disease with a mental sound is highly unusual, I
know. To understand it, we need to make a closer
connection between bliss and the quantum ﬁeld. By the1970s, the world’s atom smashers had been busy for forty
years, and now there were hundreds of “hadrons,” a class
of subatomic particles that were proliferating far too
abundantly to be conside red elementary by any standard. Didn’t the universe have simpler building blocks than this. The way out of the dilemma was found by theorizing that
all of these particles were variations not on a smaller
particle but on an underlying wave form. This wave form was dubbed a “superstring,” because it
behaves very much like a violin string. The superstring
theory holds that billions upon billions of unseen strings
pervade the universe, and their diﬀerent frequencies give
rise to all the matter and energy in creation. Certain
vibrations also turn into time and space—the preﬁx super
indicates that these strings actually reside far beyond our
limited four-dimensional reality. No one will ever see them,
no matter how powerful our instruments become. To clarify what a superstring is, physicist Michio Kaku
gives an analogy to music: imagine that a violin is enclosed
out of sight in a box. As its strings vibrate, diﬀerent
pitches, chords, sequences of notes, and timbres are
produced. If you were an alien who did not know what
music is, you would ﬁnd each of these things completely
diﬀerent from one another—the note C might be like a
hydrogen atom, while E-ﬂat was a photon. Only by opening
the box and seeing that indeed every sound came from one
violin would you be convinced that they had a uniﬁed
source. In the same way, nature’s fundamental ﬁeld is constantly
vibrating and producing variations upon the same “notes,”
but our senses are set up so that they turn this sameness
into diﬀerences. We perceive iron as a solid note, hydrogen
as a gaseous note, gravit y as a heavy note, and so on. Only
by exposing the superstrings would the underlying unity be
evident. They are exposed not by opening the box but bymathematical formulas that show that all forms of matter
and energy ﬁt the super-s tring model—as so far they all do. Therefore, quantum physics now has its ﬁrst good
candidate for a uniﬁed ﬁeld theory, justifying Einstein’s
faith in the order of the cosmos. Amazingly enough, the Vedic rishis also perceived that
the cosmos was pervaded by strings. These strings were
called sutras,  from which surgeons get the word suture. In
Sanskrit, sutra can mean  a stitch (or suture), but also a
thread or a verbal phrase. If you think of a sutra as a
thread, then the whole universe is woven like gossamer
from threads of intelligence, billions and billions of them. Like notes played on the unseen violin, the fundamental
level of the whole world, according to the Vedic rishis, is
made of sounds. Because they arise before anything else,
they are primordial—hence the term primordial sound. It takes more than one sound to make the universe. However, the rishis did have just one sound to begin with, a
vibration called Om, which appeared at the time we would
call the Big Bang. Om is a meaningless syllable—it simply
stands for the ﬁrst wave that breaks the cosmic silence. As
it breaks up into many tinier waves, Om subdivides into
diﬀerent subfrequencies  that compose the matter and
energy in our universe. Once you open your mind to the possibility, it is no more
surprising that stars, galaxies, and human beings can be
created from Om than from a superstring. Both are
abstract. Going back to the hidden violin, Kaku wrote, “The
tones create d by the vibrating string, such as C or B-ﬂat,
are not in themselves any more fundamental than any other
notes. What is fundamental, however, is the fact that a
single concept, vibrating strings, can explain the laws of
harmony”—or in the case of the universe, the laws of
nature. Om can be pictured as a straight line whose pitch rises
into inﬁnity, like the most super of superstrings. It is no
accident that the syllable Om sounds like the English
“hum”; when the rishis  tuned in to the sound of the
universe, they actually heard it as a cosmic hum. If you
were enlight ened, you would be able to hear the vibration
that is your own signatu re; for instance, you could “hear”
your DNA as a speciﬁc frequency vibrating in your
awareness. Likewise, each neuropeptide would grow out of
a sound, as would every other chemical. Starting with DNA, the whole body unfolds into many
levels, and at each one the sutra, or sequence of sound,
comes ﬁrst. Therefore, putting a primordial sound back into
the body is like remindin g it of what station it should be
tuned in to. On that basis, Ayurveda does not treat the body
as a lump of matter but as a web of sutras. —
Needless to say, it has taken me some time to explain all of
this to myself. When I ﬁrst began to administer the
Ayurvedic programs at the inpatient facility in Lancaster, I
kept one foot ﬁrmly planted in my private endocrinology
practice—although I felt in tune with Ayurvedic theory, I
was still nervous about its results. Every week I shuttled
back and forth from my oﬀice to the clinic. One October
day I walked into the dining hall and noticed one of the
cancer patients, a middle-aged man who was sitting quietly
in the corner, eating lunch with his wife. He had cancer of
the pancreas, a fatal condition that is also extremely
painful. When he had come in the door ﬁve days earlier, his
face was gray and creased after months of suﬀering. I
walked over now to say a few words. As I approac hed, he
casually looked up at me. It was one of those moments that
stops the heart. His face looked peaceful and relaxed; his
eyes were unmistakably touched with bliss. I asked himhow he felt. He said that he had no pain at all; after four
days of Ayurvedic treatment, he had taken hims elf oﬀ all
his pain medication. A few days later he left, and until the
time he died, he remained largely free of drugs. This is not yet a cure, but it is a huge step towa rd one. Consciousness would be curing people today, I am
convinced, except that we diagnose disease too late, after
years of stress have hardened the physiology and made it
diﬀicult for bliss to penet rate. But the gate is always open,
even if only by a crack. All the Ayurvedic healing
techniques operate on the premise that one treats the
patient ﬁrst, the disease second. The prospect of becoming a well person again, as
opposed to ﬁghting against a disorder known to be
incurable, gives hope to people who otherwise have
nothing to hold on to but grim statistics. One AIDS patient
in Germany has been treated with Ayurveda for two years
as part of a pilot program  conducted in Europe. Diagnosed
in 1984, he is still alive at the time of this writing in August
1988 (80 percent of AIDS  patients die within two years of
diagnosis); he leads a normal life and is without overt
symptoms. A similar program is under way in California, treating
AIDS patients under clinical observation to see if both the
latent and active phases  of the disease can be aﬀected. Both groups are small, and the subjects know that
Ayurveda is not promising a cure, but the supervising
physicians feel that they are seeing improvements,
particularly in the patients’ ability to withstand the
debilitating fatigue that saps the strength and will of AIDS
patients. Just to extend the latency period, giving a patient more
years before the disease produces symptoms, would be a
major breakthrough. However, I met one patient, not
connected with the clinic, who seems to have done betterthan that. A musician from Los Angeles in his early forties
came to be taught the bliss technique two years ago; I did
not see him again until this year,


. Add the Braggs or  tamari sauce
when the mixture begins to dry out. Add the lemongrass and continue to sauté very briefly, 1 or 2
minutes. Add the leek s and ginger to the b owl of roasted spices. Mix together well. W ith a teaspoon,
begin to work the miso into the mixture. Keep mixing. The curry will break down the more you mix
it. Pu tting some pres sure on the spoon will help to pound the spices and leeks together. Add ½
teaspoon more miso if needed. If the mixture is too dry and is not combining we ll, add up to 1
tablespoon vegetable  stock. When the mixture is well combined and the consistency of a smooth
paste, place into a glass jar and store in the refrigerator. Note: Y ou can use a small  (mini) food
processor to make the paste. Y ellow Thai Curry with Carrots and Greens
Follow the r ecipe for Y ellow Thai Curry. Make a batch, stor e in a jar with a
tight-fitting lid. 1 teaspoon ghee
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 cup leeks, chopped fine
2 cups carrots, whole, sliced on the diagonal
2 tablespoons vegetable stock
4 tablespoons Y ellow Thai Curry paste
4 cups bok choy sliced into long, ¼-inch-wide strips
4 cups napa cabbage, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon sesame seeds, toasted
½ cup cilantro, fresh and chopped
1 tablespoon coconut flakes, toasted
2 limes, juiced

In a lar ge s auté pan, heat up the ghee and sesame oil. Add the leeks and sauté for 2 minutes. Add
the carrots and veggie stock and simmer for an additional 2 minutes. Add Thai Curry Paste and
simmer for 2 minute s. Add bok choy and napa cabbage. T oss the greens in the curry paste until
wilted. Garnish with toasted sesame seeds, chopped cilantro, and coconut; sprinkle with fresh lime
juice. Fresh Cucumber with Basil and Mint
3 cucumbers, peeled, seeds removed, and sliced very thinly
¼ cup, packed, basil, fresh, thinly sliced into strips¼ cup, packed, mint, fresh, thinly sliced into strips
2 tablespoons cilantro, fresh, chopped
½ teaspoon coriander
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 teaspoon sesame seeds
1 teaspoon Braggs Liquid Amino Acid or tamari sauce,
or ½ teaspoon salt

T oss a ll ing redients to gether and let rest for up to one hour before serving. Stir a few  times while
resting to distribute the flavor. Serve as a condiment or side salad. Basmati Rice with Mangoes
2 cups or ganic basmati rice, rinsed and strained
3¾ cups water or vegetable stock
1 cinnamon stick
½ cup coconut milk
1 cup mango, fresh, ripe, cubed (use defrosted frozen mangoes)
½ teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon cardamom

In a 3-quar t saucepan, add the rice and the cinnamon stick to the water or stock and bring to a boil. Cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid and re duce heat. Allow the rice to simmer at the lowest possible
heat f or 20 minutes. Do not remove the lid from the pot. Remove from heat after 20 minutes. Fluf f
rice with a fork and  add the coconut milk and mango pieces and spices. Fluf f with a fork until
combined; remove the cinnamon stick before serving. Keep covered until you are ready to serve. Banana Coconut Stew
1 teaspoon ghee
4 bananas, peeled and sliced
½ teaspoon cloves
¼ cup apple juice
2 tablespoons maple syrup
½ cup low-fat coconut milk
In a sauté pan, heat t he ghee and add the sliced bananas and simmer for 2 or 3 minutes. Add the
cloves and  the apple juice. Sauté very briefly, 1 or 2 minutes. Add the maple syrup and the coconut
milk. The liquid should just cover the bananas. Add more apple juice to cover the bananas if
necessary. Allow the mixture to simmer fo r 10 minutes. Serve in individual dessert b owls. If desired,
garnish with toasted almonds and coconut flakes. CHINESE CUISINE
V egetable Hot and Sour Soup
Buddha’ s Feast
Marinated Sesame T ofu Strips
Simple Steamed Rice
Almond Cookies

V egetable Hot and Sour Soup
1 cup (¼ pound) fresh tofu, low-fat, firm or extra firm, cut
into thin slices
3 teaspoons Braggs Liquid Amino Acid or tamari sauce
1 teaspoon ghee
1 teaspoon sesame oil
½ teaspoon red chili flakes
1 cup eggplant, peeled and cut into julienne strips
1 cup carrots, thinly sliced
4 cups vegetable stock
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon arrowroot powder
¼ cup cold water
2 tablespoons green onions, chopped
1 cup sunflower sprouts or bean sprouts

Place the tofu into a bowl and add 1 teaspoon of Braggs. T oss with a fork and set aside. In a soup
pot heat the ghee and  sesame oil. Add chili flakes. Add eggplant and carrots and sauté 3 to 4 minutes
or unt il carrots are almost soft. Add vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Add the tofu, vinegar, and 2
teaspoons Braggs. Simmer 5 minutes. In a small bowl, dissolve the arrowroot in the cold water andcombine with a fork. Add to the soup, stirring constantly. The soup will begin to thicken. This only
takes a minute. T urn of f the heat. Ladle th e soup into bowls and garnish with the green onions and
sprouts. Buddha’ s Feast
Basic Sauce for Chinese Stir -Fry
Y ield: 2 cups
3 cloves garlic (optional), pressed, or 1 teaspoon powder
1 teaspoon ginger, fresh grated or powder
½ teaspoon red chili flakes
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1½ cups vegetable stock
4 tablespoons Braggs Liquid Amino Acid or tamari sauce
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 teaspoon mustard, dry
2 tablespoons arrowroot dissolved in 2 tablespoons
water

In a small saucepan, lightly sauté the garl ic, ginger, and chili flakes in sesame oil. Add all other
remaining ingredients  except arrowroot and bring just to the boiling point. Reduce the heat and pour
in dissolved arrowroot. Stirring continuously, simmer until thickened. Buddha’ s Favorite V egetables
Y ou will need appr oximately 2 cups of mixed vegetables per person, 8 cups
total for 4 servings. Choose any of the following vegetablesfor a stir -fry. The or der given should be the or der in  which the vegetables will cook. 1 teaspoon ghee
1 teaspoon sesame oil
2 cups carrots, diagonally cut thinly
2 cups cauliflower, bite-size pieces
2 cups broccoli, bite-size pieces, peel stalk and slice
2 cups celery, diagonally cut2 cups asparagus, 2-inch pieces
2 cups bok choy, sliced diagonally
2 cups cabbage, white or napa, shredded
1 cup red pepper or green pepper, thinly sliced
1 cup green beans, keep whole
2 cups mung bean sprouts
2 cups spinach, shredded
1 cup snow peas, whole

Begin stir -fry by heating 1 teaspoon ghee and 1 teaspoon sesame oil. Reduce this amount if you
are m aking veggies f or one or two people. Adding vegetables one batch at a time according to the
order, stir -fry until the carrots are tender. Pour sauce over vegetables after they are  cooked. Serve
over rice or udon noodles. Garnish with sesame seeds and green onions. Marinade Sesame T ofu Strips
12 ounces fresh tofu, low-fat, firm, or extra firm, cut into
cubes or slices
¼ cup sesame seeds, toasted

Marinade
½ cup rice vinegar
½ cup Braggs Liquid Amino Acid or tamari sauce
2 tablespoons maple syrup
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 teaspoon cumin, ground
1 teaspoon ginger, ground
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Combine the marinade ingredients. Cut tofu into desired shape and soak in marinade for 6 hours or
overnight. Remove the tofu from the marinade. Place sesame seeds in a small bowl and coat each
piece of tofu with ses ame seeds. Place tofu  on a sheet pan sprayed with oil. Bake in the oven until the
tofu is golden brown, 20 to 30 minutes. Add to the stir -fry or use in any dish that calls for tofu cubes.Simple Steamed Rice
1 cup basmati rice
2 cups water or vegetable stock
Bring rice and water to a boil. Reduce he at to lowest possible setting and allow the  rice to cook
undisturbed for 15 to 20 minutes. Fluf f with a fork and serve with stir -fry. Almond Cookies
1 cup almonds (you can use any type of nut)
1 cup rolled oats, or ganic

Place the almonds in a food processor and pulse for 1 minute. Add the oats and con tinue to pulse
into a coarse meal. Place mixture into a mixing bowl. 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour or rice flour
½ teaspoon cinnamon or nutmeg
½


 dearest friends. God bless all of you. May the divine
blessings extended to every  one of you help you assimilate the
words I speak tonight, so that this will be a fruitful occasion for you. The Lack of Mature Love
Because children so seldom receive sucient mature love and
warmth, they continue to hunger for it throughout their lives unless
this lack and hurt is recognized and properly dealt with. If not, as
adults they will go through life unconsciously crying out for what they
missed in childhood. This will make them incapable of lovingmaturely. You can see how this condition continues from generation
to generation. The remedy cannot be found by wishing that things were dierent
and that people would learn  to practice mature love. The remedy
lies solely in you. True, if you had received such love from your
parents, you would be witho ut this problem of which you are not
really and fully aware. But this lack of receiving mature  love need
trouble neither you nor your life if you become aware of it, see it,
and rearrange your former unconscious wishes, regrets, thoughts,
and concepts by aligning them to the reality of each situation. As a
consequence, you will not only become a happier person, but you
will also be able to extend mature love to others—to your children,
if you have any, or to other people in your environment—so that a
benign chain reaction can start. Such realistic self-correction is very
contrary to your present inner behavior, which we shall now
consider. All people, including even those few who have started to explore
their own unconscious mind and emotions, habitually overlook the
strong link between the child’s longing and unfulllme nt and the
adult’s present diculties and problems, because only very few
people experie nce personally —and not just recognize in theory—
how strong this link is. Full awareness of it is essential. There may be isolated, exceptional cases where one parent oers
a sucient degree of mature love. Even if one parent has it to some
measure, very likely the other does not. Since mature love on this
earth is only present to a degree, the child will suer from the
shortcomings of even a loving parent. More often, however, both parents are emotionally immature and
cannot give the love the child craves, or give it only in insucient
measure. During childhood, this need is rarely conscious. Children
have no way of putting their needs into thoughts. They cannot
compare what they have with what others have. They do not know
that something else might exist. They believe this is the way it
should be. Or, in extreme cases, they feel especially isolated,
believing their lot is like no one else’s. Both attitudes deviate from
the truth. In both cases the real emotion is not conscious andtherefore cannot be properly evaluated and come to terms with. Thus, children  grow up never quite understanding why they are
unhappy, nor even that they are unhappy. Many of you look back
on childhood convinced that you had all the love you wanted just
because you actually did have some love. There are a number of paren ts who give great demonstrations of
love. They may overindulge their children. Such spoiling and
pampering may be an overcompensation and a sort of apology for a
deeply suspected inability to love maturely. Children feel the truth
very acutely. They may not consciously think about it, but inwardly
children keenly feel the dierence between mature, genuine love
and the immature, over-demonstrative variety oered instead. Proper guidance and security are the parents’ responsibility and
call for author ity on their part. There are parents who never dare to
punish or exert a healthy authority. This failing is due to guilt
because real, giving, warming, comforting love is absent in their
own immature personalities. Other parents may be too severe, too
strict. They thereby exert a domineering authority by bullying the
child, and not allowing his or her individuality to unfold. Both types
fall short as parents, and their wrong attitudes, absorb ed by the
child, will cause hurt and unfulllment. In child ren of the strict paren ts, the resentment and rebellion will
be open, and therefore more easily traced. In the other case, the
rebellion is just as strong, but hidden, and therefore innitely
harder to trace. If you had a parent who smothered you with
aection or pseudo-aection, yet lacked in genuine warmth, or if
you had a parent who conscientiously did everything right but was
also lacking in real warmth,  unconsciously you knew it as a child
and you resented it. Consciously you may not have been aware of it
at all, because,  when a child,  you really could not put your nger on
what was lacking. You were outwardly given everything you wanted
and needed. How could you draw the subtle, ne borderline
distinction between real aection and pseudo-aection with your
child’s intellect? The fact that something bothered you without your
being able to explain it rationally made you feel guilty anduncomfortable. You therefore pushed it out of sight as far as
possible. As long as the hurt, disappointment, and unfullled needs  of your
early years remain unconscious, you cannot come to terms with
them. No matter how much you may love your parents, an
unconscious resentment exists in you, which prevents you from
forgiving them  for the hurt. You can only forgive and let go if you
recognize your deeply hidden hurt and resentment. As an adult
human being you will see that your parents, too, are just human
beings. They were not as faultless and perfect as the child had
thought and hoped them to be, yet they are not to be rejected now
because they had their own conicts and immaturities. The light of
conscious reasoning has to be applied to these very emotions you
never allowed yourself to be aware of fully. Attempts to Remedy the Childhood Hurt in Adulthood
As long as you are unaware of the conict between your longing
for a perfect love from your parents and your resentment against
them, you are bound to try remedying the situation in your later
years. This striving may manifest in various aspects of your life. You
run constantly into problems and repeated patterns that have their
origin in your attempt to reproduce the childhood situation so as to
correct it. This unconscious compulsio n is a very strong factor, but is
so deeply hidden from your conscious understanding! The most frequ ent way of attempting to remedy the situation is in
your choice of love partners. Unconsciously you will know how to
choose in the partner aspec ts of the parent who has particularly
fallen short in aection and love that is real and genuine. But you
also seek in your partner aspects of the other parent who has come
closer to meeting your demands. Important as it is to nd both
parents represented in your partners, it is even more important and
more dicult to nd those aspects that represent the parent who
has particularly disappointed and hurt you, the one more resented
or despised and for whom you had little or no love. So you seek theparents again—in a subtle way that is not always easy to detect, in
your marital partners, in your friendships, or in other human
relationships. In your subconscious, the following reactions take
place: Since the child in you cannot let go of the past, cannot come
to terms with it, cannot forgive, cannot understand and accept, this
very child in you always creates similar conditions, trying to win
out in the end in order to nally master the situation instead of
succumbing to it. Losing out means being crushed—thi s must be
avoided at all costs. The costs are high indeed, for the entire
strategy is unfeasible. What the child in you sets out to accomplish
cannot ever come to realization. The Fallacy of this Strategy
This entire procedure is utterly destructive. In the rst place, it is
an illusion that you were defeated. Therefore, it is an illusion that
you can now be victorious. Moreover, it is an illusion that the lack
of love, sad as that may have been when you were a child, is indeed
the tragedy that your subco nscious still feels it to be. The only
tragedy lies in the fact that you obstruct your future happiness by
continuing to reproduce the situation and then attempting to master
it. My friends,  this process is a deeply unconscious one. Of course,
nothing is further from your mind as you focus on your conscious
aims and wishes. It will take a great deal of digging to uncover the
emotions that lead you again  and again into situations where your
secret aim is to remedy childhood woes. In trying to reproduce the childhood situation, you unconsciously
choose a partner with aspects  similar to those of the parent. Yet it is
these very aspects that will make it as impossible to receive the
mature love you rightfully long for now as it was then. Blindly, you
believe that by willing it more strongly and more forcefully, the
parent-partner will now yield, whereas in reality love cannot come
that way. Only when you are free of this ever-continuing repetition,
will you no longer cry to be loved by the


 translating as “pouch” and
swedanam  meaning “fomentation” or “s weat therapy”. Theintegrated medical center called Soukya, just outside Bangalore, is
known for its extensive herb gardens — so their  potla  makes full
use of plants grown on site. Leaves f rom the  castor oil plan t (Ricinus communis ), rich in
oil, are combined with  Datura alba  leaves (this plant is widely
used by A yurvedic and Siddha practitioners in oil-based
preparations for  dressings on w ounds), skin tonifying  nirgundi  or
Vitex nigundo  leaves, and leaves from the  moringo  or drumstick
tree. The se latter leaves are a well-known natural antibiotic. In fact,
all thes e leave s contain anti-inflammatory and pain-reducing
properties, so are useful in arthritic conditions. T o prepare the  potla,
they are washed, torn up and m ixed with crushed garlic, lime and
shredded coconut flesh, then fried with medicated oil in a w ok,
before being knotted up into small pouches. Sand, like clay and mud, has the ability to retain heat or cold, so is an ideal filler
for a heated compress. When dipped in warm, medicated oil, these bundle s of
goodness spread warmth and healing deep into tense or knotted muscles. At the
tranquil Spa Village  in the Pangkor Island Resort in Malaysia, pretty batik cottons
are used to further the pouch’ s appeal. At Soukya, patients who have been prescribed this therapy are
on a  course of seven to 21 day s, and the pouch is combined with
other th erapies. It may be gi ven to people with sciatica, disc
prolapse or lower back pain, and  is usually applied after an external
massage with medicated oil. T w o therapists administer the  potla :
one war ms two of the pouches  in medicated oil, while the other
massages the other two on to af fected areas. Movements include
gentle thudding and rubbing away from the heart. Navara Kizhi
Definitely worth a try is the intriguingly named Navara  kizhi, a
Keralan treatment of fered at many spas and clinics throughout
India. A t Oberoi Spa at Udaivilas, Navara rice (a type of dehus ked,red rice)  is mixed with milk a nd a decoction of  bala  root (Sida
cordifolia ) and  boiled for half an hour until it achieves a gruel-like
consistency. It is then wrapped into a loosely spun cotton cloth that
allows t he mixture to come through easily, and applied on to the
body. The excess liquid is kept i n a reserve pan on a warmer, so that
the pouches may be periodically re-warmed. Bala  root is a powerful cell nourishing and regenerating herb,
and is used in m any A yurvedic  treatments to maintain youth and
vitality. It means “youth” in Sanskrit, and is considered analge sic,
diuretic and stimulating as well. When mixed with Navara rice and
milk, the  proper ties “go quite de ep”, according to A yurvedic doctor,
Dr Y oge sh, who recommends the treatment to develop muscles and
improve muscle tone. “The pouch nourishes the skin, alleviates
vata  problems, improves blood circulation, reduces stif fness and
strengthens both the quantity and quality of the muscles,” he says. V ariations on the Navara  kizhi  include  podi kizhi (podi  means
“powder”;  triphala  or  dashmool  are often used);  dhanya kizhi
(dhanyam  translates as “grains”, so a combination of processed
grains is  used here;  naranga kizhi  using a cloth pouch filled with
lemon and herbs dipped in medicated oils; and  elakizhi (ela  means
“leaves”. All are designed to ac t as a potent anti-rheumatic, so are
helpful for stif fness in the joints. The spa at Amanbagh uses  dashmool  powder (das  means ten,
mool  translates as roots) in its specialized  kizhi  treatment. T ied
securely in immaculate linen pouches, the pretty little bundles are
dipped into warmed, medicated sesame first boiled with handpicked
aak  leaves (Calotropis gigantea ) before application. Aak  is a
plant in the milk weed family that grows profusely in the immediate
locality; known as swallow-wort,  aak  is useful in the treatment of
paralysis, swellings and fever, and it is anti-inflammatory when
applied externally. The Sand Bundle
At the spa at R ajvilas and Spa V illage spas in South East Asia,
fomentation with  small linen pouches filled with sand are the norm. The sand bundle is classified un der  ushema swedanam  therapies,
which translates as “to warm up (bundles) to sweat”. At Rajvilas, sulphur sand from Simla (it can hold its
temperature for a long time) is tied in small linen pouches, w hichare then  dipped in warm medic ated oil chosen according to one’ s
dosha  and pounded on the body. Accompanied by massage, the
therapy is soothing for inflammatory conditions, stif fness of joints
and aching muscles; it also pro motes general wellbeing. The heat
speeds up blood circulation and promotes sweating, which in turn
helps to eliminate toxins from the body. Plucked from the organic garden, Soukya’ s leaves are washed and chopped, then
mixed with lime, coconut and garlic and fried in a wok with medicated oil chosen
according to a patie nt’s health status and  dosha  imbalance. After frying for 10 to
15 minute s, the ingredients are transferred into soft cotton pouches, before being
administered, wonderfully warmed in oil, on problem areas. The gorge ous property in Udaipur known as Udaivilas not only boasts tranquil
surrounds on Lake Pichola, it offers numerous sites for therapy. Built to resemble
a Mewari palace, scallop-edged arches,  jaali  windows, cool sandstone and marble
decorations, as well as abundant gardens, offer a delightful backdrop to a spa
suite. beauty
Ancient beauty  -enhancing rituals are
experiencing a renaissance globally, as
people look towards “natural” rather than
“chemical” solutions to the symptoms of
aging. India is well placed to cater to
such needs, as it is home to a rich
selection of hair, skin and body
treatments, all of which work both
internally and externally to create a
glowing complexion, soft skin andlustrous locks. In addition, we consider
some wonderful de-toxing and
beautifying baths and some inspiring
therapies that employ gems, crystals,
metals and minerals for healing. ayurvedic facial care
Indian women have been harnessing herbs and plants for
skin care for centuries. Nu merous Sanskrit texts outline
facial and other beauty treatments, and evidence of natural
cosmetics dates back to at least 3,000  BC  in excavations of
the In dus V alley civilizat ion in present-day Pakis tan. Instructions for extracts of flowers, leaves, barks and herbs
for both medicinal and cosmetic purposes are plentiful in the
V edas — and the flawlessn ess of Indian women’ s skin is
captured in countless paintings from the past. Some of  the more common Indi an beauty products that have found
a w orldwide market include  kajal  or kohl eyeliner and  mehndi
(henna), as well as various per fumes and oils. Kajal  found fame
with the  Moghul Empress Nur Jehan; it is traditionally made from
triphala, alm ond, camphor and cabbage, all burnt in the oil of rose,
and has been exported for decades. Oils of sandalwood, musk and
rose hav e been traded along w ith India’ s cotton and spices for
centuries, and the Rajput combination of rose and milk for facial
scenting and cleansing is well documented. More recently, as
people h ave become aware of th e potential pitfalls of chemical and
synthetic skin, hair and beauty products, Indian herbal recipes have
become increasingly popular in global markets. In addition to formulating, manufacturing and selling facial
products, India is starting to capitalize on some of its ancient be auty
treatments too. Threading, the ancient art of facial hair extraction, is
finding favor in London and New Y ork day spas, and henna hairtreatments are increasingly pr omoted in high-end hair salons. Marma  massage on the vital ener gy poi nts of the face is a therapy
of fered in many South East Asian spas and the Indian head mass age
is widely used as a “filler” whilst a client is resting with a face
mask, fo r example. These, along with some of the more medicinal
A yurvedic treatments,


 the ovaries,  but maintain an
awareness of the  perineum to  retain  the energ y that you have
brought  there. Practice Ovarian  Breathing  by opening  and closing
the vagina  slightly  in order  to collect  the energy  in the Ovarian  Palace. (2) Drawing  Energy  to the Jade Pillow
    Once  you feel that enough  ovaries’  energ y has been  collected,
inhale  a short  sip and  close  the vagina,  pulling  the ovaries’  energ y
downward to the  perineum, and  then  contract  and pull the front
part of the  perine um upw ard to bring  energ y to this  area. Rest  for a
while and be aware of the energy  that travels  from the ovaries  dow n
to the  vagina,  clitoris  and perine um. Inhale  anothe r short  sip and
bring  the energ y up to  the sacru m, T-11,  and C-7,  and then  slightly
push  the chin do wn and pull it back,  moving it to ward the back of
the neck at  the base  of the  skull. (Fig. 5.23)  Feel  this push  create  a
force  that activates  the Cranial  Pum p, which will help  to pump the
dense  ovaries’  ener gy. Hold  the energy  at this point  for a while,
feeling  it being  stored  and transformed. Exhale,  then  perm it your
sacru m, T-11  and neck  to relax  in their  normal positions. This action
will help  to activate  the Adrenal,  Sacral  and Cranial  Pum ps again. Retain  the energy  at the base  of the  skull. Repeat  this entire  process
nine times. - 103  -Cultivating  Ovarian Power
Jade Pil low
Fig. 5.23  Guiding  Energy up to  the Jade Pill ow. F. Sixth Stati on: Crown Point, Larger St orage Point  For Se xual
Energy
   Your next stopping  point  is called  the Pai-Hui,  located  at the
midpoint or cro wn, of your head  and is the  center  housing  the pineal
gland. This point  is a large r storage  point. - 104  -Chapter  V
((1) Collecting Energy in  the Ovarian Palace
    IPractice  in the same m anner:  only  this ti me yo u will fill the  “stra w”
to the  top. Collect  the ovaries’  energy  at the Ovarian  Palace. Close
the vagina  with a minimal movement of  the Chi Muscle,  pulling  the
ovaries’  energ y dow n to the  perineum, and feeling  the sensation
as the  vagina  closes:  contract  and pull do wn the front  part of the
perineum to  bring  the energ y there. Hold  your breath  and retain  the
energy  at the  perineum. Be aware of the  Ching  Chi that  has been
brought  to this  place. Exhale and return  to the ovaries,  but maintain
an awareness at the perineum to  retain  the energ y that you have
brought  there. Practice Ovarian  Breathing  by opening  and closing
the vagina  slightly  in order  to collect  the energy  in the Ovarian  Palace. (2) Drawing  Energy  to the Crown Point
    Once  you feel that enough  ovaries’  energ y has been  collected,
inhale  a short  sip and  close  the vagina  by pulling  downward to
bring  the ovaries’  energ y to the  perine um, and  then  contract  and
pull up  the front  part of the perineum to  bring  energ y to this  area. Rest for  a while and be aware of the  energ y that travels  from  the
ovaries  down to the vagina,  clitoris and  perin eum. Inhale  and tilt the
sacru m and  T-11  to the  back  in order  to straighten  the spinal curve
out a little bit  and thereb y help  activate  the lower Sacral Pum p. At
the same ti me push  the sternu m in toward the back,  tuck y our chin
in a little, and squeeze  the back of  your skull: this  will activate  the
upper  Cranial  Pump. Continue  pulling  up to  the point  at the  top, the
center  of the head. (Fig. 5.24)  As yo u continu e to inhale,  bring  the
energy  down to the perineum, up  to the sacrum, T-11, C-7, lade
Pillow, and then  turn your eyes and other  senses  upward to help
guide  the energ y up to  the point  of the  Pai-Hui, or  crow n point,  and
the pineal  gland. (3) Resting and using your mind to guide energy  to the Brain
   Once  the energy  finall y has completed  its course  up into your
head,  use your eyes and other  senses  to help  retain  it in the  brain,
holding  it at the top of your brain  as co mfortably  as possible. Exhale,
then let y our sacrum, T-11 and neck relax,  retur ning to their  normal
positions. This wi ll help  to activate  the three  pumps: Sacral,  Adrenal
and Cranial. Use y our mind to guide  the energ y station- to-station
up the spine  to the top of the  head. Fix your attention  and eyes at
- 105  -Cultivating  Ovarian Power
the crow ·n point. Remember it is the  resting,  period  that is the
strongest  in guiding  the ener gy to the brain. Repeat  this process
nine times. Crown
Jade Pil low
C-7
T-11
Ovarian Palac eSacrum
Fig. 5.24 Guiding  Energy up to the Crown  Point. - 106  -Chapter  V
G. Circulating  the Energy  in the Brain
(I) Filling the  Brain  Cavity with Creative Sexual Enengy
    When you have  finished  practicing  nine  times, and  can feel the
ovaries’  sexual  energ y fill the brain,  start  to circulate  the ener gy in
the brain  for nine,  eighteen,  or thirty -six counterclock wise revolutions. There  is a ver y distinct feeling  of spinning  outward. (Fig. 5.25(a) )
When this circulation  is co mpleted,  turn the energ y back into  the
center  of the brain  for nine,  eighteen,  or thirty -six clockw ise
revolutions. (Fig. 5.25(b )) This should  feel pleasan t and energ etic
and will help to balance  the left and  right  sides  of the  brain,  vitalizing
it to increase  memory and think  more clearl y, and it will introduc e
you to the  beginnin g stages  of the ability  to control  sexual  energ y
and emotional  frustratio ns. As people  age and use up mu ch of
their Chi, the y gradu ally drain  them selves  of brain  energ y and spinal
fluids, drying them up  and leaving  a cavity. Ovarian  Breathing
transports  creative  sexual  energ y to refill this cavity  and thereb y
revitalize  the brain. Taoists rega rd sexual ener gy as similar to  brain
energy. (2) Touchi ng the Tongue to the  Palate to Permit the Energy
to flow down to the Navel for Storage. Be sure  the tongue  is touching  the palate  (behind  the front  teeth
will suffice),  so that  the warm ovaries’  energ y can flow dow n to the
third eye, to the  inside  of your nose,  and through  the tongue  from
which it is no w able  to travel  down the throat  to the  heart  center. - 107  -Cultivating  Ovarian Power
(a) Circ ulate the ener gy in the brain
nine, eightee n or thirty -six times
counterc lockwise  (Spin ning outward). (b) W hen the co unterclockwise  turns
are complete d, circu late the energy
nine, eig hteen or thirt y-six times
clockwise  (Spinning i nward). Fig. 5.25 Circulating  Energy in  the Crown
- 108  -Chapter  V
(Fig. 5-26) Retain  the energy  in the heart  center  for a while, filling  it


 push energy away or grab onto it. Someday, you’re going to remember this discussion. Something is
going to wake up inside, and you’ll know just what we’ve been talking
about. You’ll observe the energy pulling on you, and you will try to let go. For the first time you’ll realize what is actually happening—you are
struggling with yourself. You are both sides of the struggle. Part of you
wants to let go but part still wants to give in to the pull of the energy. Once
you sincerely want to let go of the old habitual energy flows, you will
realize that you have all the power you need inside. You’re the only one
living in there. You just need to deeply relax and stop fighting with yourself. At that point something amazing  is going to happen: All the energy that was
pulling you down and out changes direction. It begins to lift you in and up. This is the transmutation of the energy, and it is real. As liberat ion becomes
the meaning of your life, this inner process will step up signifi cantly. Once
you learn that your center of intent is stronger than any of the habitual
energy flows caused by your samskaras, you will sit quietly within, in the
seat of consciousness, and allow the process of purification to take place. Every day, every moment, you have the opportunity to explore the greatness
of your being.Letting go like this is not a struggle or an act of control. It is much
subtler than that. Perhaps this analogy will help. Imagine you’re in a game
of tug-o f-war. You are alone on one end of the rope, and an entire NFL
football team is on the other end. You’re in big trouble. The force pulling
you in the team’ s direction is very strong. You’ve studied all the latest
techniques for how to dig in your heels, how to best use your bodyweight,
and anything else the experts could teach about standing your ground in a
tug-of-war. You’re doing all the techniques, but they’re not working. Suddenly, Yoda, the great sage from Star Wars shows up to help (he
thinks everyone’ s name is Luke). Yoda: Luke, you know not how to do this. Let go. Let go, Luke. Luke: What do you mean, let go? If I let go, they will pull me
through the mud, headfirst. Yoda: Let go, you must. Luke: I don’ t get it. How do I just let go when this great force is
pulling on me? Yoda: Relax hands, Luke. Relax your hands. Luke: No, not hands—feet, legs, and body position. That’ s how to
end this tug-of-war. Yoda: Over it will be, Luke, if you relax your hands. Turns out, it’s true. If you relax your hands during a tug-of-w ar, the
struggle will immediately be over. No more rope. No more pull. No matter
how strong the pull is, if you relax your hands, you can go home and have
lunch. That’ s all you really wanted to begin with. Who said you had to take
the whole football team home with you? Just relax and let go, and the whole
struggle will be over. That’ s exactly what it’s like to surrender. You’re in
there, and the energy is pulling  you into it. Please don’t fight it. Just relax
your inner hands and let go. If this sounds very Zen, good, because it is. Y ou
don’t need to be strong; you need to be wise. The blocked energy can’t take
you anywhere if you simply relax and let go. Over time, you will find there is a place inside you that is behind the
commotion of the storm. You can simply relax and fall back into that place.This is the place  from which you are noticing the inner commotion, and this
place is still, quiet, and there are never any storms. That is the seat of Self. You don’ t find your way back to Self—you simply cease to leave. If you work
on this, you will come to a beautiful state within that is alwa ys there for
you. It is a place of refuge, and all you ever need to do is keep letting go. That is the life of surrender.Chapter 38. Exploring the Higher States
Once you are no longer drowning inside, a whole other life becomes
possible for you. We can now begin to discuss who you are, and what it can
be like in there. As the blockage s release, the energy is freed from having to
go aroun d them. You start to feel happier. You start to feel higher. You start
to feel like you used to feel when you had a really good day or a particularly
great experience. But this time, nothing special is happening. You’re just
feeling an uplift ing energy going on inside of you that keeps getting higher
and higher. You start feeling love simply because the sky is blue. It used to
take a special moment in a relationship to blow you away like that. Everything that is happening comes in, and you feel it all at a richer, deeper
level. This is because you are more open, more receptive. You don’t have
the need s and problems that you were trying to solve. Because you don’t
have all that commotion inside, and you’re feeling more whole and
complete, there’ s nothing you need from the outside. You start to look at
needs in a completely dif ferent light. You used to make satisfying needs your priority. Most of our modern
needs are psychological, not physiological. Psychological needs are actually
unnatural, as they indicate that something is missing or wrong. If you are
feeling whole and complete inside yourself, there are no psychological
needs. Psychological needs come from your blockages. When the energy is
freed, what you feel is love, joy, and enthusiasm, which are just different
words for uplifting energy. In the purest sense, this upward-flowing energy
is quite different from emotions. An emotion emanates out of your heart and
pulls you into its vibration. Enthusiasm is something that wells up inside. It
is a system-wide, spontaneous, uplifting flow of energy. It is, in fact, freed
shakti.When your energies are liberated, you don’t need energy from anybody
else. You have so much energy inside you it’s incomprehensible. Surely you
have experienced from time to time that if something you really like
happens, there can be a sudden  burst of inner energy. How long does that
take? A billionth of a second. Imagine you’re feeling depres sed and not
doing well. Suddenly, something  happens. Perhaps you receive a phone call
that gets you talking and smiling—it makes your energy flow. The energy
was always there, but you opened up because the phone call matched
something you liked. A blockag e temporarily got out of the way, and all this
energy flowed up. Truth is, if that blockage had not been in the way, you
would not have needed the phone call to open you. This is why you do the
inner work of releasing blockages. As the blockages release, the energy takes you to higher and higher
states. You alrea dy know what the higher states are. The higher states are
about love. They are about being really enthusiastic about your job and
anything else you’re doing. The higher energies are beautiful. They’re much
more beautiful than the expression of the lower energies. As you open up,
life is no longer about seeking nonnegative states; it becomes about
allowing ever-increasing, positive states. Growth used to be about not
feeling anger or anxiety anymore. Now it’s about feeling so much
overwhelming love when you wake up that you have trouble getting out of
bed. Then the feeling of enthusia sm to go to work gets so strong that it pulls
you out of bed and propels you through your day. This is what  it feels like
when the ener gy is flowing. Most people don’ t believe life can be like this. They feel they must find
the perfe ct job in order to be enthused to go to work. How are you defining
“the perfect job”? You define it as the one that opens you. In other words,
the one that fits your blockages just right so your energy can flow. Problem
is, if the same job ever hits your blockages the wrong way, you will close. You are still letting your samskaras run your life. It’s not a matter of finding
the right job; it’s a matter of releasing the blockages so you can be enthused
about the job you have. No matter how high you get, you can always get much higher. Don’ t
believe those who say you can’t enjoy happiness unless you also know
sadness. That is not true. That’ s what life is like if you are still blocked. Once you’re unblocked, you will notice the energy is always beautiful. It is
an ever-new rush of uplifting joy that raises your heart, your mind, andeverything insid e you. You’ll be more aware than you used to be and have
the enthusiasm of a child about everything you get to do. You might wonder why you would be motivated to do anything if
you’re already that content. Why bother having a job, or even a relationship,
if you’re  alread y filled with so much love and happiness?


 shrieks of  boisterous chil-dren in the back seat as you head to the supermar-
ket. It may choose to ignore what could be other-
wise oppressive heat, or to experience as “unevent-ful” the previously painful encounters at the dentist’s
office. You have all learned about mind over matter in
this way. You have all “forgotten” about a headache,
or “ignored” a momentary frustration, in favor of a
larger or more important experience you chose tohave. This process we are calling Step 3 is not differ-
ent from that. It is a process you have used over and over
again in your life. What is remarkable about it is not
that you have used it before, but that you do not
think you can use it whenever you wish.46Bringers of the Light
Now, as stated earlier, the degree to which your
body begins to automatically do things
which allow you to remain in a State of Being de-
pends on the degree of commitment and determi-
nation you  demonstrate. We have all seen how this process works in smaller
ways in everyday life. If you are determined  to “be” a
thing — whether it’s the thing called “peaceful” orthe thing called “joyful” or the thing called “success-
ful” — nothing in the world can stop you. That is also true if you are determined to be the
thing called “depressed,” or “upset,” or “unable,”
Nothing, nothing, in the world can stop you. Ever try to enliven a person who is determined to
be sad? You can just forget it. You’re wasting your
time. The same is true of a person who is determined to be at
peace. So if you determine to “be” a certain thing (that
is, to express, experience and fulfill a State ofBeingness upon which you have decided), and if youNeale Donald Walsch 47
stick with your decision  no matter what the appearance
of things, your body will sooner or later find itselfautomatically  doing things  which tend to enhance the
possibility of producing that beingness in your expe-
rience. Before long, your mind will also join the action. You are, after all, a three-part being — Body, Mind
and Spirit — and all three aspects of your being willsoon be engaged if you make, and stick with, a
Beingness Decision. That is because Beingness
Decisions are triggers which fire reactors in every fi-ber of your being, at every level of your functioning. They are the keys which start the engine of Creation. This explains why, once a Beingness Decision is
made, you will begin to automatically eliminate from
your life everything unlike what you seek to be. This
you will do on an almost subconscious level. That isto say, you may not even be aware that you are doing it. Your concerned family, friends and co-workers may
even say, “Are you sure you know what you’re do-ing?”  You won’t be able to answer them, because, in48Bringers of the Light
truth, you may not be sure. You have allowed, in a sense, your automatic func-
tions to take over. These include your instincts, your
responses, your inner discernment. This is what
happens when you “let go and let God.”  You mayfind yourself reaching for that cigarette, and then
suddenly putting it down for no reason...never to
pick one up again. Or calling some friends, andplacing the receiver back on the hook, never to hang
out with those people again. Or going to work, but
turning around and coming back home, never to goback to that place again. Something inside of you
will just tell you, “no more.”  Some intuitive mes-
senger will simply say, very quietly, “It’s time to quit.It’s time to move on. It’s time to change.”  And all
the fear, all the anxiety you may have had around
that will suddenly be gone. So don’t be surprised — if you stay focused  on the
State of Beingness you select — to find after a matter
of days, weeks or months that you have simply easedout of certain friendships, and “gravitated” towardsNeale Donald Walsch 49
others; eased out of certain physical environments,
and gravitated towards others; eased out, yes, even
of your job, and gravitated toward other ways of
“making a living.”  Sooner or later you will stop “mak-ing a living” altogether...and will spend all of your
time making a  life. This is the movement which will take you towards
Right Livelihood. This is the process by which you
will create and express your True Self. You will discover, if you trust this process, that
you can adopt a State of Beingness (and more than
one state if you wish), and move into the experience
of that. And you will discover that your state of in-
ner Being will, and should, have nothing to do withthe state of your outer experience. Dentist’s chair or noisy kids in the car, none of it
will make any difference. The exterior circumstancesof your life will no longer control and create the in-
terior experiences of your Soul. You will easily and effortlessly move away from
and eliminate those exterior conditions which you50Bringers of the Light
wish to eliminate, and hang on to those you wish to
retain (regardless of how “disruptive” they used to
be, for you will no longer find them “disruptive”),
and thus recreate yourself anew  in the image and like-
ness of Who You Really Are. Still, there are some things you should know about
this process you are being asked to trust.Neale Donald Walsch 51
Bringers Step 4
Observe Opposition
and call it Opportunity
The first thing you need to know is that there
will be opposition. Opposition in the form
of people, events and circumstances which will seem
to create a barrier to everything you say you are; ev-
erything you declare yourself to be. As a matter of fact, not only will there be opposi-
tion — but the opposition will increase. It will be
greater than it ever was before. So if you thoughtyou had problems before, hold onto your hat, be-
cause, in the words of the inimitable Jimmy Durante,
“You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.”
(If you haven’t the foggiest notion who Jimmy
Durante is, move two spaces back and lose a turn;do not pass GO, do not collect $200.) The fact that “things are going to get worse before
they get better” may not be the most exciting news
you’ve heard since picking up this book. Still, youmust be told — and when you understand why this
is so, you will actually rejoice should things take a
downward turn. It all has to do with Principle #4:52Bringers of the LightNeale Donald Walsch 53
Principle #4
As soon as you decide
who and what you are,
everything unlike it will
come into the space.This is how it is, and this is how it must be. But now, try to understand why. To grasp what you are about to be told, you have
to see clearly the Truth about Opposites. The Truth
about Opposites is that they don’t exist, except in the
space of each other. That is to say, “hot” does not exist except in an
environment or space in which there is “cold.”  “Tall”does not exist except in the space of that which is
“short.”  “Fast” cannot even be a concept unless and
until there is a thing called “slow.”
In the World of the Relative (which is, by the way,
the world in which you have chosen to spend most
of your time), a thing is only what it IS relative toANOTHER thing that it is NOT. Do you understand? That may sound a bit con-
fusing, but do you get it? You should hear that as anenormous Truth ringing in your ears. It’s just another way of saying that in our present
state of existence, everything is relative. Yet the principle, applied to metaphysics, yields54Bringers of the Lightsome very interesting insights. For if a thing is noth-
ing except in the space of that which it is not, then
YOU cannot be ANYTHING except in the space of
that which YOU are not. And so the opposite of what you wish to “be” will
appear almost as soon as your wish to “be” it is heard. Indeed, your Soul draws these conditions to itself.And God will give the Soul everything it calls forth,
as the Greatest Gift of the Grandest Creator, in or-
der that the Soul may fulfill Itself in this, Its highestdesire. Thus will the Soul thank God for those treasures
which are called the Conditions and Events of Life,and thus will the Soul welcome all of Life’s experi-
ences, honoring them equally, the “good” and the
“bad,” without judgment. If you feel that you understand the concept em-
bodied in this basic principle of life, go back now to
what was said in Step 4. We said, “Not only will there be opposition — but
the opposition will increase. It will be greater than it
Neale Donald Walsch 55ever was before.”  We also said, “when you under-
stand why this is so,