Big death and little death—elements of change.
Physical death, in particular, is one of those unavoidable events we usually approach in a negative way. Many experts on grief and loss refer to physical death as big death. No one is immortal while in the body. Big deaths are part of our lives over time as we lose loved ones to the inevitable consequences of simply being alive.

There is one more kind of death—often referred to as little death—that we usually experience much more frequently; it is the psychological state of both the process of day-to-day letting go and endings. Both big death and little death are components in the larger process of change.

Big death can lead to major changes in life.
When we lose family members and close friends, we experience big death. Our lives may change dramatically in terms of companionship, love relations, finances, work, or responsibilities towards others. The key word here is ‘loss’ and the process of big death almost always involves loss and some degree of grief.

We take comfort during times of big death in our spiritual beliefs and in our loved ones. We understand that those close to the deceased share a common bond of grief and loss. We tend to pull together in mutual support and strategies for coping with that grief and loss. When the immediacy of the big death has faded, we discover that our lives may or may not have been altered in substantial ways that are a direct outcome of the dramatic change in our relationship to the person we’ve lost.

Little death is more important than most people realize.
In one degree or another, change affects us when we experience a loss. Often these losses may may involve common things in our day-to-day lives: losing a job or being the victim of downsizing, moving, sending a child off to college, losing an investment, getting in a minor car accident, seeing a friend suffer, and many others.

Big death and little death involve the same processes.
In response to either of them we can grieve, get depressed, experience anxiety, or feel unbalanced, incomplete or even fearful. The only difference is our response to them. We often pay acute attention to big death and are profoundly shifted into a recognizably new perspective. We often react less forcefully to little death but can experience equally profound effects in our lives resulting from them.

Another difference between big death and little death is the degree to which we seek out solace or comfort from family and friends. Big death engages others in powerful emotions like nothing else. Little death usually elicits from others sympathy and concern, but not at the level called for in big death.

The experience of loss in any form is a journey without clear sign posts.
The road that you travel when you experience loss is more like a roller coaster than a highway. There will be ups and downs, There will be bumps and detours. Some of the sign posts may be misleading or missing altogether. Whether you are making this journey with big death or little death, take your time—slow down and give yourself plenty of room to change your route if you need to do so. The end destination is peace and acceptance, but the destination is not as important to bear in mind as the journey it takes to get there.

During your journey notice your reactions and pay attention to the inner part of the trip as much as the outer conditions. Common reactions may include:

• Disbelief, shock, or non-acceptance

• Sadness, despair, or loneliness

• Self-recrimination or guilt

• Anger and blame

• Inability to focus or concentrate

• The manifestation of physical reactions like weight loss or gain, unexplained aches, insomnia, or lowered resistance to disease

Companions along your journey.
Your first companion is yourself. Pay attention to your own needs when coping with loss. If you grieve, allow yourself to do so fully. If you need time to process things, take all the time you need. If you need to retreat from the outside world or lose yourself in it for a while, do so without blame or recrimination. Thinking of yourself as a traveling companion automatically shifts the intensity of your feelings into a supportive and conversational role with yourself just as you would relate to a real-life companion on a real-life cross country road trip.

Your second companion is someone else.
Family and friends, spiritual advisors, therapists, and many others are ready to become your traveling companions on this journey of resolving the loss that’s affected you. Bring them along on the trip. Let them contribute to the journey. They can be invaluable in providing the insight and perspective you need in order to make your journey safely. Ideally, they should let you be in charge of the journey but be willing participants along the way. They should not tell you how to feel or which direction to take; if they do, drop them at the next bus station and continue on.

All journeys come to an end.
You may find yourself back home or somewhere entirely different. The choice is yours. Your journey is now complete and your life can move on.

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He is currently working on several writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson InkWorks for information.

Get your free copy of my new book:
The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
Click here to download

To be sure, having money and control mean having power and influence, and the extremely wealthy often do hold the public’s eye more often than not. Working hand in hand with money is the exercise of control. Money doesn’t mean much if one has no control over external forces. Money is often highly prized as a way of gaining desired control over one’s privacy, life experiences, sense of accomplishment, and emotional fulfillment. We often base our happiness on on money. We often feel hopelessly unfulfilled due to a perceived lack of it.

Putting too much attention on money and control leads to loss of freedom. We feel our options are limited because we’ve already established that money equals control equals happiness equals fulfillment. When this happens for the most part, it is because we’ve bought into the idea that everyone needs to control their lives to achieve happiness and that having lots of money is the best way to get there. It’s hard to live up to the standards that others expect us to meet but it requires a conscious act of our own to begin to experience true freedom.

What are some of the ways to break this cycle of over-attention on money and control?

Giving for giving’s sake.
When you give without expectation of getting anything in return, it feels wonderful! Find ways to give more to your family, your work, your relationships, and yourself. Every situation or person demands its own pathway to fulfillment. What can you give that will further that fulfillment? Get out of the way of your beliefs about needing to maintain control or hold on to money.

Just give of yourself in some meaningful way and you will begin to shift a change in how you look at the abundance in your life that you may not have noticed before. Giving is a wonderful balance to the perils of putting too much attention on the acquisition of money or control.

Live life as an act of creation.
Human beings are born from an act of creation and live an act of creation during their entire lives. If we are conscious enough, our deaths can even become creative acts. Not many people are exercising their full creative potential, or when they do, they create haphazardly or with little alignment with their highest goals and aspirations.

It is no wonder they are unhappy. Dead end jobs, failed relationships, and numbing mediocrity are no fun at all. People do not suddenly become happy when they acquire lots of money for a simple reason: a lifetime of they are failing to work with their innate creativity will not provide the passion and excitement life requires to be well lived. You cannot be happy and uncreative at the same time unless you’ve got a couple of brain cells out of place.

The most creative persons in the world are those who allow themselves the freedom of expression in some form. Sports, the arts, business, families, community, nature, cuisine, and many others things can all serve as fertile areas for personal acts of creation. Create something and watch how your happiness meter shoots up a few degrees.

Get out of the vacuum through relationship.
Whatever vacuum you’ve created in your life in your pursuit of money or control, get out of it now! Work is fine, working an 80-hour week is not healthy, no matter how you look at it. Your relationships suffer, your health suffers, and perhaps worse than anything else, it is easy to lose sight of who you are in many important ways.

Human beings thrive on relationships. Although painful at times, all relationships with others have the potential to heal our past and evolve our future. Connect with your kids and your spouse. Find healthier ways to connect at work with the boss — ones that don’t involve Herculean hours and sacrificing other relationships — or find a new job or a boss with healthier ground rules. You’ll find that relationships abhor vacuums, and once you break the seal on your work vacuum, your other relationships will flourish.

Loosen up and play a little.
We somehow theorize that the important things in life require big decisions and monumental attitudes of seriousness. Any kid can tell you that that theory is about as crazy as adults can get. The fact of the matter is, life is not serious most of the time. Wild animals play with each other and their environments.

People play with each other spontaneously if given half a chance. Playfulness can defuse tense situations and blow off steam from the level of your living room or back yard all the way up to the largest meeting of dignitaries from around the globe. Let the love in. Find ways to be more playful with yourself and you’ll certainly discover that others want to be around you for a little playtime too.

Use freedom whenever and wherever you find it.
Most of the time, when we feel restrictions in our lives, it is because we fail to notice the tremendous power we all possess to exercise our will at any time. In this way we choose restriction and there’s no good reason why we cannot choose freedom just as easily. Nothing liberates us more than knowing we have options, no matter the circumstances. Freedom effectively breaks control issues and establishes us as effective players in a universe of change.

Together, unqualified giving, living life as an act of creation, nurturing our relationships, playing, and exercising our freedom of choice are more than enough to break the hold money and control have on our lives. It’s time to place money firmly back where it belongs as a particular kind of energy rather than as an end in itself. Doing so will loosen our desperate need to control and introduce a more natural and ever-changing form of energy into our lives.

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He currently makes his home in southern California and is working on several content writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson Inkworks for information.

Get your free copy of my new book:
The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
Click here to download

When I finished my run, I entered the lodge where several, indeed a clear majority of people, were also wearing clothes with little or no corporate labels. There were no vid screens blaring out advertisements for lift tickets, local restaurants, or vacation packages. No ads promoting snow-conquering cars or winter tires.

It was a world where advertising, corporate-style mass marketing, and technology had not yet begun to dominate everyone’s visual and auditory fields. It was a world that was white, pristine, silent, thrilling, and natural all on its own and no one seemed to need to be reminded of how glorious it all was. A sales pitch wasn’t required or expected; we got the message about all that winter coolness all on our own. My attention was unfixed and free to enjoy the winter playground and the people around me without constraint.

The world is different today. Today, people are mobile billboards for their shoes, jeans, caps, gloves, eyewear, sports equipment, cellphones, cars, satchels, luggage, laptops, purses, and jewelry. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past several years, you have been conditioned by thousands of hours of television, miles of billboards, and endless gigabytes of the Web.

Even the Internet, once proudly non-commercial, has been taken over by mass marketers who’ve refined their black arts for the digital age. Who is swayed by 2D line drawings in newsprint ads, when rich media has given us interactive, emotionally engaging ads designed to engage and entertain? Most of the information overload we complain about comes not from anything important, it comes from trivializing our connection to the world through overt consumerism and mass marketing.

Human beings have a seemingly infinite hunger for and capacity to be sponges of information. We revel in it like hogs in a wallow. We can’t get enough of it. If we should experience a momentary lull in the background marketing chitchat that’s always present in our lives, we become oddly disturbed. Rampant commercialism and propagandistic merchandising is so ubiquitous in modern culture that we must be constantly bombarded with some kind of sales pitch to feel all’s right with the world.

We pay little attention to its spread to our children, who now demand expensive designer shoes and tiny little labels on their own clothing. We do not notice how popular movies have become hyper-merchandised into toys, cereal boxes, books, DVDs, music, and vacation packages. We click our tongues at our sports heroes caught in marital indiscretions, but seem to be more interested in the millions of lost revenues from endorsing sponsors. Our attention is increasingly fixed on the trivial.

Pharmaceutical companies, once banished to doctors’ offices and hospital procurement programs, now use television to make their pitches to minute niches with a few thousand sufferers of this condition or that. Find enough of those sufferers willing to plunk down their insurance cards or their cash and you’re talking serious profits. It doesn’t take a math genius to estimate those profits for pills that cost pennies to manufacture and sell for $300 a bottle. Multiply that by say, 50,000 patients (out of a total population of several hundred million) and you’re in niche nirvana.

Amplify that by the power of television to persuade and you can further sell to those who probably don’t have that condition in reality or don’t really have to medicate for it if they do, but are convinced that they should. All that remains is to cheerfully cover the possible adverse side effects — dizziness, constipation, heart failure, nerve damage, convulsions, whatever — with a smile and a song and you’re all set.

Wall Street and Madison Avenue have partnered up with blessings from Big Insurance and the AMA. The American people are now a little further down the road toward believing in their own utter lack or health. All of which has been made possible only within the last decade by a recent president’s push to “liberalize” the regulations concerning advertising for the pharmaceutical industry — after millions of political contributions by said industry to convince the lawmakers of its righteous claim to mass market its products on the airwaves.

Are you truly feeling healthier now that you know that your “restless leg” syndrome can be easily, if a bit expensively, treated with a prescription? Are you happy knowing that Grandad can now conveniently perform like a stud in the bedroom with Grandma? Twitching limbs or other body parts not your concern? Nevermind . . . the marketers will find another drug to bring relief or delight, even if you don’t yet realize you need it.

We are living in a virtual chaos of information, and most of it utter drivel. Our culture has been commandeered by corporate interests pushing information to millions of info-junkies who are not even aware of the war being waged for their hearts and minds, not to mention their bodies — via their pocketbooks.

While there is nothing wrong per se with information itself, there is something seriously out of sorts with our individual lives, our society, and our collective future when we begin to OD on the junk info that masquerades as the real deal. Junk info, like junk food, does nothing to support our overall health and well being. Eat too much junk food and you can actually become ill and die of malnutrition. Consume too much junk info and your attention fixes on irrelevant and meaningless data that has no place in a healthy, fully functioning, multidimensional living system.

The point is that all this marketing is polluting our environment with an unnecessary and ultimately meaningless form of energy that has only a few real effects: it takes away our awareness of who we are and what we can become, it saps our ability to function efficiently without distraction, and it fixes our attention on the trivial rather than on what’s important for our personal well being and our collective potential as a species.

Can we not make some decisions right now before it’s too late? Can we not focus on our real needs rather than on this freak show of consumerism? Can we not choose to do something different?

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He currently makes his home in southern California and is working on several content writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson Inkworks for information.

Get your free copy of my new book:
The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
Click here to download

Coming out the silence of the fifth course, I gradually became aware, first of my breathing, then my body, and finally the world around me. Soon enough, my head was filled with the usual chitchat that I often likened to a tree full of monkeys arguing with the parrots next door. I caught myself thinking random thoughts about TV, snacks, and my favorite beer.

Amazing how the conditioned mind clings to potatohood. I realized that one seven-course mind meal would not be enough. It would take me many more sessions to break the burlap bag of my spudly bonds. The fifth course was a good start, however, and I was deeply appreciative for all the grand new tastes and sensations involved in this spiritual meal.

Stifling an impulse to follow my belly into the kitchen, I got up, stretched a little, took care of a few bodily functions, and began to think about course six. This course would be the meat and potatoes, so to speak, of my transformation from couch potato to . . . what, exactly? I suppose I had not given it much thought up to this point. What exactly did I want to be other than a couch potato?

The answer came to me in a sudden rush of inspiration. I was excited. Of course the next-to-last course would be something special, but then again, weren’t they all? I could not honestly pick out which course of the previous five was my favorite.

• Was it the slightly irreverent, light humor for the appetizer? A gustatory gem to be sure, it set the tone and shifted my awareness from uninvolved and unconscious seriousness about being a couch potato to the a more humorous and friendly way of looking at things.
• Was it the scientific gazpacho of belief? In this special blending of flavors, I came to realize that my awareness of myself as a couch potato came from subconscious programming and that I had the innate capacity to shift that consciously, and to even acknowledge that shift in my own biology.
• Was it the caloric salad of definitions and measured results? The confusion between the definitions of the term calorie as a single unit and a thousand units only emphasized the trap of language in trying to define things in the physical world. Language is often imprecise. Science alone cannot shift consciousness. The crunchiness of this course delighted me, but as with all such salads, rapidly proved to be too insubstantial to provide lasting benefit.
• Was it the cleansing sorbet of exercise? Delightful, to be sure. Nothing gets the starch out of sedentary couch potatoes like stretching your roots and shaking your leaves a bit.
• Was it the winged delight of meditation? The fifth course allowed me to reconnect and renew in a very deep, body-mind-spirit way. It’s hard to put into words, but it proved to be one of those all-too-rare experiences that signal a fundamental shift and a deep appreciation for things just as they are.
• Will it be the taste bud titillations of the sixth course? I would soon find out if the sixth becomes my favorite of the entire spiritual meal.

The world would be my sixth course. It is a world of movement and stillness, beauty and plainness, songs of joy and tears of pain, exquisite connections and unbearable loneliness. The sixth course, the meat and potatoes of the whole grand meal, needed to be a rediscovery of all my senses wrapped up into one whale of an experience. I needed to taste, touch, see, hear, and smell the world itself for this course.

It had just rained, leaving everything fresh and bright this crisp afternoon. The light was amazing and golden as it streamed down from the source of all life on this planet. Clouds and trees seemed to wrap themselves around this light as if drinking from an immense well of sustenance.

Birds twittered their happiness in a canopy of leaves that steamed their moisture into the atmosphere to join the clouds. Somewhere dogs barked and cars sped. The dusty grime had settled leaving everything smelling fresh and fragrant. The air was warm and still against my skin and I could nearly taste its fullness with my tongue.

I walked, deeply grateful, in a world that enveloped my senses with a completeness that I had not often allowed myself to savor. I walked in appreciation and quiet joy. I walked with my body, mind, and spirit and only the present moment existed in all its innate goodness. I walked because I chose to.

After the previous course ended, all too soon for my taste, my body relaxed, my mind alert, my brain humming with serotonins and endorphins, I realized that each one of us engages the world where we are in that moment. And it is in that engagement that we connect to ourselves and to all other things. The world is naturally what it is, and our consciousness colors our perceptions of the world according to our beliefs and experiences.

Why not make of it a deliciously grand meal that naturally sustains our being rather than a tiresome little fast food quickie wrapped in paper and smothered with chemicals? Is it really so hard to do? I think not, but know that I would have to nurture this new-found connection to the world consciously and practice it until it becomes second nature. I could feel my couch potatohood begin to recede into the background already.

The seventh course proved to be quite delicious, a sumptuously rich concoction of relationships all wrapped in a swirl of sweet fulfillment. My dessert would be this sweet and more. After my walk, I came home to find my loved ones there as well. Everyone was relaxing after a day in the outside world. Everyone was healthy, safe, and loved.

All were delighted that I had taken a walk, and some even remarked that I somehow seemed different . . . but in a good way! Even the old cat, often a cantankerous and complaining beast, purred as she looked up with her silent question: Something to eat?

Smiling, I began to tell them about my wonderful seven course meal that had so nourished and satisfied me. I couldn’t wait to whip up some tasty dishes for them to experience as well. I wondered if I could feed the neighborhood this way as well. And why stop at the neighborhood? Why not feed the world?

This ends the final installment of Confessions of a Spiritual Couch Potato.

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He currently makes his home in southern California and is working on several content writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson Inkworks for information.

Get your free copy of my new book:
The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
Click here to download

As I finished my delicious gazpacho of The Biology of Belief, it occurred to me that I had no idea what a calorie actually was, much less why I needed to slough a few thousand of them off in order to stop being a couch potato.

I decided to make calories my third course. Delightfully crisp and crunchy, Wikipedia, which happened to be on my computer, was waiting to be plated up and dressed. I dug into course three with gusto:

The calorie is a pre-SI metric unit of energy. The unit was first defined by Professor Nicolas Clément in 1824 as a unit of heat. This definition entered French and English dictionaries between 1841 and 1867. In most fields its use is archaic, having been replaced by the SI unit of energy, the joule. However, in many countries it remains in common use as a unit of food energy. The kilocalorie per mole remains in use in computational chemistry and molecular spectroscopy.

OK, so something about the calorie being a unit of energy. No wonder I always feel like a baked couch potato, because the calorie is a unit of heat! Something about it being an archaic form of measurement for heat. And something about it being a measurement of food energy.

Did fat people exist prior to 1841? And do chemists somehow deal with giant, red-hot garden pests at times (kilocalorie per mole)? I began to imagine the attacks of giant moles (energized with kilocalories of electric force not unlike Godzilla) attacking couch potatoes at their roots while they lay semi-comatose amidst empty bags of chips and crumpled cans of soda. No wait! I’m reading into it; I need to stick to the facts. Later on, I found this in Wikipedia:

In the context of food energy the term calorie generally refers to the kilogram calorie. However, the term kilocalorie (kcal), referring to one thousand gram calories, is also on in widespread use especially by professional nutritionists (when speaking in terms of calories rather than joules). To avoid confusion, the the prefix kilo- is not used with the kilogram calorie.

OK. So this much we know so far: a calorie can be both a gram calorie or a kilogram calorie. Wow! Something that can not only be itself but also one thousand times bigger! Who would know? I could claim that a favorite dessert was only 200 calories when in reality, it was 200,000 calories! No wonder the body was confused! No wonder I was a couch potato!

I was suddenly overcome with all of the flavors from each course I had enjoyed so far. I felt full and replete. Armed with this new knowledge about the calorie, and fighting off an mysterious need to cleanse my palate before continuing, I was ready for the fourth course.

The fourth course, a sorbet of particular distinction. As I was thinking about the fourth course, I had wandered into the kitchen and opened the fridge door. Absently, I reached for a beer then stopped myself. No more red-hot giant moles nipping at my roots zapping me with kilocalories of energy, nosiree! I will save the beer for cases of extreme emergency, say when I need to rehydrate after going out to the mailbox or if I need to cool down those kilocalories on a hot day. My man, Dr. Lipton, was right when he said:

The conscious mind’s capacity to override the subconscious mind’s preprogrammed behaviors is the foundation of free will.

I could exercise my free will and that provided the key to the fourth course — exercise! Soon I was bending and stretching in ways that would have popped my eyes out as a couch potato. From deep within my potato consciousness I drew forth old memories of all the hiking, biking, kayaking and yoga I used to do as a young spud.

After the stretching, I ran up and down the staircase a few times just to get the starches going. Winded but happy, I savored this fourth course rediscovery of moving for moving’s sake. My palate was refreshed and I was ready to move on to see what other delights awaited me.

My fifth course was a flight of the spirit. Traditional cookbooks call for poultry to provide the focus of the fifth course. A suggestion I hardily endorse. Nothing beats Chicken Amore, dazzlingly encrusted with mushrooms, garlic, olives, and thyme. No vegetarian I! However, this bird was of a decidedly metaphorical kind, and I wanted my fifth course to soar on wings of gossamer, not bog down with kilocalories of gustatory gluttony. This thyme-less bird would have all its feathers intact and quite free of encrusted glazes as it reached for the clouds. It was time to meditate.

My office library once again provided the solution to this course in due time. It took the form of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It’s a story about a young shepherd who goes after his dream and finds a world of magic, ecstasy, wealth, and hope.

With slight raspberry overtones, this deliciously simple book never fails to leave me with whispers of its sweet after note. It was the perfect complement to the first four courses. I read a few of my favorite passages and settled down for a long overdue session with myself that required only my complete presence and a willingness to sit in silence . . .

Continued in Confessions of a Spiritual Couch Potato: Part III . . .

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He currently makes his home in southern California and is working on several content writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson Inkworks for information.

Get your free copy of my new book:
The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
Click here to download

Couch potato. The term itself conjures up images of some dim, vegetative consciousness happily ensconced in its living room watching TV and self-fertilizing with buttered popcorn and beer. Where did I pick up that identity? My father was a workaholic and anything but a couch potato. I would have classified him as more of a healthy ear of corn: fast growing with golden tassels blowing in the wind.

My mother was an energetic woman who filled her life with friends, family, and strangers. Perhaps a cross between a sweet baking apple and a juicy pear. Both were always on the go. Both raised their children to be even more active copies of themselves and we were anything but couch potatoes in our pursuit of life.

It would appear that the roots of my couch potatohood lay buried somewhere in the dark recesses of my consciousness. It would take extreme effort on my part, but I promised myself that I would put down the popcorn and beer, launch myself off the sofa, and track this conundrum down come hell or high water. With various, rather loud bodily processes that signaled the start of unaccustomed movement, my frozen joints creaked into action and I was off and running . . . well, at least ambling . . . towards my goal.

The first stop was my office library. The couch potato in me rejoiced at the fact that, being a work-at-home writer, I didn’t have to go far to begin my research. The Great Caloric Burn-off I felt so compelled to initiate did not have to begin just yet. It would come after stoking my brain with the mental framework it needed to gain some perspective on the current sad state of affairs.

I was now in search of sustenance for my mind, the kind of mental nourishment I needed to meet this challenge. With the practiced eye and taste buds of a gourmand, I surveyed my choices. The menu was eclectic and full of promise. I could feel my synapses begin to salivate in anticipation.

I decided to begin with a light first course, an appetizer of verse in a poem by Pete Graf called Anatomy Lesson:

Fingers like poking and picking your nose
And prodding and probing and taking off clothes.
Legs are for walking and kicking and cramps;
Tongues are for talking and licking of stamps.
Arteries boost all the blood to your brain,
But basically backwards, it’s all done in vein.
Gonads are great, though not for us all;
But if you are a man, then you’ll have a ball.

Drink too much booze and your liver explodes;
Snort too much coke, you’ll be blowing your nodes
Adenoids are an enlarged mass of tissue,
Subtract-a-noid and you’ll have less of the issue.
You can sit on a Flag pole, but not at half-mast;
You’ll be split in two places and rendered half-assed.

Yes. munch munch . . . This had everything I was craving to begin with: a little zest, a bit of irreverence, and a certain freshness — all wrapped in a light, crunchy explosion of sensory titillation. I could feel my palate respond to this stimulus and knew that I was in for more savory delights as I continued my explorations.

Soon enough, the first course was over and it was time to choose the second one. Sensing that it was time to shift gears slightly, I considered the various jacketed soups filling the shelves in my office library. Which one to choose? Shall it be a creamy, full-bodied, chunky, empirical bowl of science chowder? Or a thin but tasty, artfully prepared bouillabaisse of the spirit?

Perhaps a hearty burgoo stew or a rich crab pot of the body to provide the necessary physical energy needed to do the heavy lifting necessary to uncover the origins of my potatohood. Such choices are never easy, but in the end, I opted for a gazpacho of new biological thinking called The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles by Bruce Lipton, PhD.

Endowed with the ability to be self-reflective, the self-conscious mind is extremely powerful. It can observe any programmed behavior we are engaged in, evaluate the behavior and consciously decide to change the program. We can actively choose how to respond to most environmental signals and whether we even want to respond at all. The conscious mind’s capacity to override the subconscious mind’s preprogrammed behaviors is the foundation of free will.

That’s more like it! slurp slurp . . . Not quite a chunky empirical bowl of pure science. Not quite a spicy cioppino of the emotions. This gazpacho was fresh and to the point: we can consciously override our programmed behaviors by exercising our free will. Nice. And worth holding on the back of my tongue as I savored my mind meal further.

In anticipation of the third course, I decided it was time for a brief visit to my garden to pick some fresh herbs for my salad. I suddenly realized that the shift from a mental seven course meal with written works on the menu to a simple gathering of sustenance for the physical body was unexpected but not unnatural. My seven course meal may have been contrived completely in my head, but my body’s need for real food became apparent nonetheless.

So where was the artificial distinction between mind and body? Could that be at the heart of my adoption of potatohood as a way of life? Deep in thought, I prepared my salad while vaguely aware of the pleasant scents of fresh basil and lettuce and the tang of lemon dressing ready to pour. I carried my plate of salad back to the library, ready for course three . . .

Continued in Confessions of a Spiritual Couch Potato: Part II . . .

About the Author
Timothy Thompson is a professional freelance writer/editor whose work with Dream Manifesto helps illuminate life for online and offline audiences around the world. He currently makes his home in southern California and is working on several content writing and editing projects. Visit Thompson Inkworks for information.

Get your free copy of my new book:
The Principles of Successful Manifesting - How to make your life dreams come true.
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On this afternoon, April 16, 2008, Dalton was describing the satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, building the discussion around the Amritsar massacre in 1919, when British colonial soldiers opened fire on 10,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children trapped in Jallianwala Bagh Garden.

For 39 years, Professor Dalton has been inspiring Columbia and Barnard students with his two semester political theory series that introduces undergrads to the ideas of Gandhi, Thoreau, Mill, Malcolm X, King, Plato, Lao Tzu. His lectures are about themes, connections between disparate minds, the powerful role of the individual in shaping our world. Dalton is a life changer, and this was one of his last lectures before retirement.

Over the course of a riveting 75-minute discussion of the birth of Gandhian non-violent activism, I found myself becoming increasingly distressed as I watched students cruising Facebook, checking out the NY Times, editing photo collections, texting, reading People Magazine, shopping for jeans, dresses, sweaters, and shoes on Ebay, Urban Outfitters and J. Crew, reorganizing their social calendars, emailing on Gmail and AOL, playing solitaire, doing homework for other classes, chatting on AIM, and buying tickets on Expedia (I made a list because of my disbelief).

From my perspective in the back of the room, while Dalton vividly described desperate Indian mothers throwing their children into a deep well to escape the barrage of bullets, I noticed that a girl in front of me was putting her credit card information into Urban Outfitters.com. She had finally found her shoes!

When the class was over I rode the train home heartbroken, composing a letter to the students, which Dalton distributed the next day. Then I started investigating. Unfortunately, what I observed was not an isolated incident. Classrooms across America have been overrun by the multi-tasking virus. Teachers are bereft. This is the year that Facebook has taken residence in the national classroom.

Students defend this trend by citing their generations enhanced ability to multi-task. Unfortunately, the human mind cannot, in fact, multi-task without drastically reducing the quality of our processing. Brain activation for listening is cut in half if the person is trying to process visual input at the same time.

A recent study at The British Institute of Psychiatry showed that checking your email while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment 10 points. That is the equivalent of not sleeping for 36 hours more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana. But to be honest, on the educational front, multi-tasking feels to me like a symptom of a broader sense of alienation.

I know what it is like to be disengaged. In fact, the crisis that played a large role in ending my chess career was rooted in becoming disconnected from my natural love for learning. Throughout my youth, I had been a creative, aggressive chess player. I loved the battle, and wild, dynamic chess felt like an extension of my being.

Then, in my late teens a coach urged me to play in the opposite style, his style of quiet, positional, cold-blooded prophylaxis. Instead of cultivating my natural strengths, he boxed me into the cookie cutter mold he knew. In time, I lost touch with my intuitive feeling for chess, and without an internal compass I foundered in the swells of fame and high-pressure competition.

I see myself in the eyes of so many kids today. Too many primary, elementary, and high schoolers are being boxed into the mold of conformity required by big classes, competition for grades, tests with multiple choice questions. The first grader who leaps to his feet when he figures out the math problem is diagnosed as ADHD and medicated to sit quietly with the class. Young learners have immense pressure to perform, to get good grades, but no one is listening to the nuance of their minds.

They feel suppressed, they are suppressed, and by the time students get to college, they have become disconnected from the love of learning. Then they are asked to read 1000 pages in a week and skimming is the only solution. Many of the students who actually were engaged in the Gandhi lecture, the ones who wanted to learn more than to shop, were taking notes on their computers in a frenzy, researching events online while Dalton described them, typing every last word of the lecture.

But Dalton had already supplied them with a detailed course packet with all the relevant dates and facts. His classroom is an environment for reflection, introspection, and letting resonant themes sink into your being. Unfortunately, to these college students the notion of delighting in the subtle ripples of learning is almost laughable. Who has the time?

The societal implications of this educational crisis are huge and the issue must be addressed creatively. We cannot afford to lose a generation to apathetic disengagement. Part of the responsibility lies in public policies like No Child Left Behind, the standardized tests that are turning education into a forced march, and a culture that bombards us with so much stimulation that it is difficult to know what to focus on. But part of the burden also lies with parents, teachers and coaches, and with students themselves.

I recently tried to persuade two smart 11-year-olds to give up video games for three weeks. One agreed to the experiment, and to send me a description of how the process feels. The other simply couldn’t imagine life without the PSP, even for a day. Here was an eleven-year-old self-proclaimed incorrigible video game addict!

This story has a happy ending. In the final month of classes, Dennis Dalton discussed the issues of multi-tasking with his students, and many responded. Last week when I went back to hear the final lecture of Daltons Barnard career, there were only a few kids surfing the Internet nearly all the students seemed riveted. Many told me they were relieved to have turned off their computers and relaxed into listening.

A number of my old classmates came, and afterwards we threw a party for our teacher. After four decades inspiring college minds, he has decided to nip apathy in the bud by teaching younger kids. He will start with high school, but Dennis Dalton, one of our cultures greatest minds, dreams of teaching kindergarten.

A note from Josh: Dear Teachers and Parents, I am researching the effect of video games on young minds. If you think it might be a healthy experience for your kids, please ask them to give up video games for two or three weeks, and write me about the experience at TheArtofLearning@gmail.com. Thank you! – Josh Waitzkin

About the author:
Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning, was the subject of the book and movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer. An eight-time National Chess Champion in his youth, he is now a martial arts champion, holding a combined 21 National titles in addition to several World Championships. Josh is president of the JW Foundation, an educational nonprofit -  www.jwfoundation.com He is currently training for the World Championships of his third discipline, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, and lectures nationwide on the subjects of the learning process and performance psychology. Waitzkin lives in New York City.

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Imagine for a moment a woman who inherits an antique jewelry box from a loving grandparent.  She puts the cherished keepsake on her makeup bureau, next to her own collection of rings and pearls, but never really pays it much mind. And there it sits. But what she doesn’t know is that her grandmother hid a priceless diamond ring within it, in a secret compartment. It’s hers to have, if only she knew where to look for it. But will she?

In many ways this is a story not unlike our own: for “hidden” within each of us, and yet in plain sight, is a power unmatched in its brilliance. What is this potential diamond of the mind that awaits whoever will find it? It is our ability to attend to what we will. Coupled with awareness, attention empowers us to unite ourselves with whatever we wish to know and be. Let’s examine this largely unexplored gift of ours.

Much as we just learned in the preceding section – that we have the right to remember what we choose to – so are we graced with an immense interior gift: the power to give our attention to what we will – to what enriches and serves us.

Continuing states of stress and sorrow are the result of having mistakenly placed our attention upon what punishes us, stealing from us our happiness as a result. The following new self-knowledge reveals the secret ins and outs of this dark dynamic: Any time our attention is given to some thought or feeling, it animates that condition; our attention invests what it falls on with a certain kind of life energy.

Another unknown phenomenon about attention is that when it is given to something – for instance, a timeless night sky – it facilitates within us a union with the qualities of that “world.” And this dynamic is in operation all the time: to consider something is to be connected to it. So, our attention connects, animates, and nourishes whatever we lend it to in life. And more than this, but as a part of its power, we have all witnessed the following:

You’re stopped at a red light, and you look out your car window at someone passing by. You follow him with your eyes – interested in something about his appearance or manner. As you remotely study this person, the power of attention moves through and across time and space and it “touches” him in some way. The next thing you know he turns around and looks at you!

This power can be used for good or bad. When we use it for practical work, or for honest self-observation, we use it to our own benefit. However, when this power operates on its own, within us, without our awareness of what it’s interacting with, it can cause many problems. Here is where the unattended mind becomes the breeding ground of self-defeat. For instance, any time our attention is placed, without our knowing it, on some way to escape ourselves, here’s what happens: more often than not we find out – too late – we got hooked up with some self-harming idea that ultimately led us to compromise ourselves.

This new kind of self-knowledge places us on the threshold of a wholly different, brighter life. If by being inattentive to our own interior life, we see how much of our unhappiness is self-created, then, we can learn to redirect our attention, placing it within what is right and bright. But, there is only one way to realize this reversal: we must work to see how wrongly directed attention works against us.

Perhaps a thought pops into your mind about a problem that’s been bothering you. Appearing with it is some emotional disturbance. Now the thought starts rolling, growing in its demand for your attention. Almost instantly it has defined what needs to be done, or what you are powerless to do. And both states accomplish the same dark end: You’ve unknowingly animated that thought and given it a life – and the life you’ve given it is your own! Here’s an example of how this scene might unfold:

A man is walking through his office when his boss walks by and gives him a blank look. The thought pops into the man’s mind that his boss is criticizing him or doesn’t like him. Now, as he starts to fear this idea – a negative picture produced by his imagination – his mind focuses its attention on this disturbing image. And the more he attends to this dark dream, the further into its labyrinth he descends, strengthening its presence and power to further irritate him. A heartbeat later, he has no doubt: the boss has it in for him! This thought grows in authority for him, tormenting him for the rest of the day and causing him to snap at his family when he gets home. And all of this suffering is born of what? The conjunction of a passing glance and a moment of misdirected attention!

Here’s the amazing thing about this illustration, and what we want to learn from it: this whole drama has been played out inside of the man – storyline, stage, cast, and leading characters. But he doesn’t see how this painful state is self-created; instead he believes it has been cast upon him by someone else – his heartless boss! So, what else can he do – being in the dark as he is to his true condition – but try to rid himself of his stressed feelings? How? By arguing with his boss, either outwardly or in his mind.

The more he feels punished by the situation that he sees in his mind, the more he wants to fight with it. He’s sure his unwanted experience exists independent of his perception of it, but we can see he’s mistaken. His pain is a product of how he sees the event and then all of the misery that comes with resisting his own mistaken perception. He is quite literally lashing himself, and the more he resists what he thinks is happening, the more it happens to him! This is a good description of what I call the “circle of self.” In it we can see how the pain of our own mistaken perception produces the enemies it needs to keep itself alive.

From our vantage point, we can see how the man’s unattended mind first animated a fearful thought, which leads to wrongly feeding it with his own life. We can also see that nothing can change for him until he sees the truth behind his trouble and withdraws his consent from it.

We suffer because we consort with painful thoughts and feelings, thinking somehow that not wanting them makes them go away. But our unconscious actions betray us: first, by animating what makes us ache, and then by binding us to that relationship through our resistance to it. Here’s a simple way of saying these last few ideas: Not wanting our negative states actually nourishes them!  I can almost hear the question that comes next: “Wait a minute! You can’t be saying these dark thoughts and feelings are good, and that we should want what’s hurting us, are you?”

Of course not! Negative states have no right to exist in us as they presently do. And that’s just the point. We literally give them a place to live in our psychic system – feed them, as it were – by trying to rid ourselves of them in the usual ways. But there are other ways of dealing with pervasive dark states besides resisting them, suppressing them, or trying to change the conditions seen as being responsible for them. Instead of these acts of willfulness, we choose in favor of watchfulness.

Rather than struggling with dark states, learning to be quietly watchful of them does two things at once: first, it separates us from being wrongly identified with our own thoughts about that troublesome state. Second – by the light of our newly liberated attention – we catch a glimpse of a powerful insight whose light helps set us free:

If we mistakenly give any negative state its “life” – then the opposite must hold true: we can consciously withdraw that same life any time we so choose!

Here is a simple exercise to help you get started with this new kind of seeing that is the power behind freeing you. Several times each day, whenever you can remember to do it, deliberately disconnect yourself from your own thinking. Choose awareness of your thoughts over being absorbed in the sensations they produce as they carry you along to get what they want. The aim here is simple: reclaim your attention in order to be where you are, and then just quietly notice all that you can about yourself.

The light of this new order of awareness empowers you to catch and release what your own unattended thoughts had been busy cooking up for you, using you as stock! Each time you remember to reclaim your attention in this manner, with it you regain your life. And here is a bright bit of encouragement to help you get started. The words that follow are those of Simone Weil, a brilliant French writer, activist, and lover of the Light: “Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.”

Excerpted from The Essential Laws of Fearless Living, Weiser Books, 2008. Available in major bookstores and on Amazon.com.

About the author:
Guy Finley is the best-selling author of more than 36 books and audio albums on self-realization. He is the founder and director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit center for self-study located in southern Oregon where he gives talks four times each week. For more information visit www.guyfinley.org, and sign up to receive a free helpful newsletter emailed to your desktop once each week.

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Your luck is your psychokinetic resonance with the environment you are in. Like everything else, luck is an energy. It is something that is quantifiable not in physical but in nonphysical ways. You can quantify it physically only in terms of its physical manifestations in your life. Luck is dependent on time, place and consciousness. When you are lucky, you are in mental and emotional resonance with your surroundings. When you are unlucky, it is the opposite. The level of resonance is the level of your luck.

Luck is also a feeling or emotion because emotion is energy in motion. When you are lucky, you are also feeling lucky. Your feeling is your vibration and therefore you are vibrating luck and feeing it. You feel and experience that everything is working for you when you are lucky. You feel that everything is working against you when you aren’t lucky. A state of vibrational harmony or disharmony with your environment is the whole explanation for this. You either feel that things are in a flow or things are disrupted.

Your energy level determines your luck vibration. At times when you are feeling low of energy, that is also when your luck vibration is at a low point. You are more likely to make careless mistakes, become more accident prone and flop up in some way. When you are feeling high of energy, that is also when your luck vibration is in a high state. You are sharper, clearer and more in the zone. You seem to be able to do amazing things in ways that baffle others to the point that makes you seem very skillful or lucky.

Actually luck and skill are one. The more in energetic resonance you are with your environment, the more your skill will work and the luckier you’ll seem. You can always observe that when the best are in action, they always seem to have both their skill and the situation working for them. You can never separate luck from skill because after all, they are both part of the same thing called psychokinetic resonance with the environment. Your skill is your capability of handling the situation which depends on luck.

Once you know that luck is an energy, you can depend on it in that manner. You cannot depend on luck that is considered to be random chance occurrence. You can’t depend on such things because they do not exist. A non existent thing cannot be depended upon. Everything that exists is a part of consciousness and can be controlled by consciousness. Therefore luck exist and is fully under your control. Knowing this, you never have to fear of bad luck because you can make all things work in your favor.

Since luck is dependent on energy, you have to pay attention to your level of energy in every moment and take charge of it. When you notice that your energy level is low, be more careful with the things you do especially if they are important. You may make mistakes that usually never happen, and wonder how could you be so unlucky or stupid. You may realize that every time you have made careless or stupid mistakes that seem to be like bad luck, it was when your energy level was indeed at a low point.

Lack of focus and lack of being adequately present minded also creates bad luck. Do you notice that when you make stupid mistakes in situations, you felt that you were not ready? What do you mean by not being ready? You mean that you weren’t focusing properly or fully enough, and you weren’t being adequately present minded. The first step to controlling luck is to be present minded. If you want to be lucky, you must put your focus in the activity you are doing. Or else you’d create bad luck and mistakes.

Your level of focus and placing your mind in the present determines your psychokinetic resonance with the environment. Focusing is how you channel energy towards a particular time and place. When your focus is here, your energy is channeled here and you experience luck here. Where you focus is where you generate luck in. That is why the secret of success is focus. Successful people are lucky people because they have more focus than the unsuccessful and unlucky ones. Focus to be a lucky one.

Seek to maintain a high level of energy or vibration at all times. People who experience their luck going up and down throughout the day allow their energy to go up and down. People who experience their luck being consistently high all the time maintain their energy and vibration at a high level. At times when your energy is low, seek to increase it to a higher level again. Do not continue doing any work at a low level of energy because you will tend to make mistakes. Recharge your energy first, then work.

Be aware of negative thoughts and feelings that will bring your level of energy or vibration lower. Positive thoughts and feelings bring your energy level and vibrations higher. Therefore choose to think positive thoughts and feel positive emotions, and you will experience more luck and success in your life. You can also increase your luck when you are more intent of succeeding in a certain situation. Your energy of intent will energize you with the luck you need, and that is why willful intent bends the world to you.

About the author:
Enoch Tan aims to help people achieve greater awareness in living and experiencing life, to evolve human consciousness to higher levels and to revolutionize the way we understand the mind and reality, because that’s what governs every area of life and destiny. When you learn Secret Knowledge of The Universe and Answers to Life Greatest Mysteries, you can have Wealth, Power, Freedom and Anything you want! Visit the site: Secrets of Mind and Reality

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Nothing is free. If you want to be wealthy, you must pay the price for wealth; if you want success, there’s a price for that. The price of achieving these things is applying the law of mind – and not everyone is willing to do that. For example, I knew a wonderful metaphysical teacher in New York City named Mrs. Menier. She lived in the Lucerne Hotel and had a friend who would visit her, borrow books, and accept the old clothes that were offered to her. I asked Mrs. Menier one time, “Why doesn’t this woman listen to you – to your teaching? She doesn’t have to wear your old clothes. She could become successful on her own.” Mrs. Menier replied, “She’s unwilling to pay the price. She’s unwilling to pay attention and apply these truths. She prefers old clothes to wisdom.”

I think Mrs. Menier was right. Her friend preferred old clothes, secondhand umbrellas, and things of that nature to the application of mental and spiritual laws. All she had to do was take an interest in the great truths, but she was unwilling to pay the price. That’s true of many people. Mrs. Menier was very sympathetic and kept on giving her old clothes, but I don’t think that actually did her friend any good.

Whatever you desire, you must give your attention, devotion, and loyalty to it. There’s always a price to be paid. When you learned to drive, you had to make a conscious effort to learn how to steer, merge, and park. You can probably do all these things effortlessly now. At this point your subconscious mind is actually driving the car. You paid the price by paying attention to learning how to drive a car, and now you can do it automatically.

The price of getting what you want includes having faith that your desires can be fulfilled – and not everyone has this faith. For example, at a summer seminar I was teaching in Denver on the powers of the subconscious mind a few years ago, I met a woman who had been praying for ten years for her eczema to be healed – with no results. She had applied various astringent lotions and other topical medications without any appreciable relief. Although she had tried to be healed, she had never paid the price, which was to have complete faith in the Infinite Healing Presence and the law of her own subconscious – to trust the law and believe that the Healing Presence would respond and heal her skin. She had been giving power to externals, saying, “My skin is sensitive to the sun. I’m allergic to the cold weather. I believe this eczema is spreading all over my arm due to heredity. It’s my genes and chromosomes that are at fault.” After I explained the importance of having complete faith in the One Power, she began to pray as follows:

The Infinite Healing Presence that created my body and all its organs knows all the processes and functions of my body. I claim, feel, and know definitely and absolutely that the grandeur and glory of the Infinite are made manifest in my mind and body. The wholeness, vitality, and life of the Infinite flow through me now, and every atom of my being is transformed by the Infinite Healing Presence. I fully and freely forgive everyone, and I pour out love, truth, and beauty to all my relatives and in-laws. I give thanks for the healing that is taking place now, and I know that when I call, the answer comes.

She repeated this prayer slowly, quietly, and reverently several times every day. She told me prior to my leaving Denver that a remarkable change for the better had come over her entire being and that her skin had completely healed. She had faith and received the gift of healing.

Faith is attention, devotion, and loyalty to the One Creative Power. You have faith when you know that thoughts are things; that what you feel, you attract; and that what you imagine, you become. You have faith when you know that any idea deposited in the subconscious mind comes forth as form, experience, and conditions. For example, a group of hikers was lost in a forest but had faith that they would be guided to safety. They had no compass and didn’t know anything about navigating by the stars, but they sat down and said: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He will lead me to safety. He is guiding me now.” They followed the lead (an intuition or hunch) that they received from the Supreme Intelligence, and they found their way to safety.

They paid the price by having faith in the Divine Source and calling upon it. Faith comes through understanding the laws of your mind and applying them diligently in all your affairs. Scientists have faith that their research will lead to a greater understanding of nature. Farmers have faith that the seeds they deposit in the ground will result in a harvest. Before you can receive wealth, you must have faith that you will get it. You must impress your subconscious mind with the idea of wealth, for whatever is impressed on the subconscious is expressed on the screen of space.

There are a number of qualities that contribute to personal success in life. Some of these – such as being born to good parents, in a favorable country or social class, or with natural physical and mental endowments – are completely out of our control. Fortunately, the qualities that really count are the ones that we can cultivate, and the most important of these is persistence. If you examine the biography of any man or woman who has made a lasting contribution to humanity, you will find that the majority exercised uncommon persistence.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent won’t – nothing is more common than talented people who are unsuccessful. Education alone cannot. The world is full of educated derelicts. Only persistence and determination are omnipotent.

Give all of your allegiance and devotion to the God Presence and realize that it’s your guide, your counselor, and the source of all blessings. There’s no other power. Think of the wonders that would happen in your life if you gave your complete attention and loyalty to that great truth. But if you give power to sticks and stones, to men and women, to the weather, and to all these other things, you’re worshiping many different gods and won’t get what you want. When you awaken to the truth that there’s One Power, One Presence, and One Cause, then your good will flow to you.

In a Nutshell
Nothing is free. If you want to be wealthy, you must pay the price for wealth; if you want success, there’s a price for that. Whatever you desire, you must give your attention, devotion, and loyalty to it; and then you’ll get a response, of course. The price is recognition, belief, and conviction. There’s always a price to be paid.

Give your attention, devotion, and loyalty to any subject and it will yield its secrets to you. If you don’t give your attention to a particular subject – whether it’s chemistry, mathematics, or your job – you’ll remain in darkness about it.

In order for you to receive, you must first give an idea to your subconscious mind. Before you can receive wealth, you must first impress your subconscious mind with the idea of wealth. Whatever is impressed on the subconscious is expressed on the screen of space.

Cast from your mind all preconceived notions, false beliefs, and superstitions; and realize that before you call, God will answer. Whatever you’re seeking already exists in the Infinite Mind. All you have to do is to identify mentally and emotionally with your desire or idea, realizing that it’s as real as your hand or heart.

Wisdom is the Presence and Power of God functioning in you. Acknowledge God in all your ways, and He will make plain your paths. Trust and believe in God, and your desires will come to fruition.

About the author:
Excerpt from Dr. Joseph Murphy’s Maximize Your Potential Through the Power of Your Subconscious Mind -To Create Wealth and Success. Dr. Joseph Murphy (1898 – 1981), the founder of The Church of Divine Science, produced books, tapes, and radio broadcasts on spiritual matters, the historical values of life, the art of wholesome living, and the teachings of great philosophers – both from the Eastern and Western cultures. Dr. Murphy wrote more than 30 books. His most famous work, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, was first published in 1963, became an immediate bestseller, and was acclaimed as one of the best self-help guides ever written.

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