If I give myself the task of learning to trust the abundance of the universe, I have given myself trouble.
(If the universe is abundant, I can either notice it or not. I can celebrate it or deny it. But I won't have to trust it, ever. Because it either is or it isn't.)
My tests show that it is.
But I never used to trust it.
So I never engaged the abundance, I just wrestled with the mind-made scarcity that my thoughts created.
Once I gave myself the task of trusting, (and because the task was not possible to achieve) I never fully trusted the abundance of the universe. Because I'd given myself an impossible job to do prior to interacting with people, exchanging value and creating wealth.
Why would I want to place an impossible task between me and creating wealth? Why not just go directly to the activity of creating wealth? (Because I thought I had to trust it. Somehow I feared making the effort in vain.)
Trusting is that impossible task that you put between yourself and doing something worthwhile. Adults think they have to trust things before making an effort, which is why they often settle for a robotic, "safe," habituated life.
I'm always using the example of a child learning to swim and a child learning to ride a bicycle. When we did that as children we never trusted the bicycle or the water. And if we had had to fully trust that the water would hold us up or fully trust that the bicycle would not tip over, none of us would know how to swim or ride bikes because that job could not be completed.
So, without trusting the water, I got in the water. And without trusting the bike, I got on the bike. And that's how I learned to ride a bike and learned to swim.
So, go do great service and become prosperous like a Samurai wealth warrior without trusting it because trusting is not only an unnecessary job but a hopeless job and really overrated in life as something that needs to occur.
That small scared self in all of us, what some people call the ego, is all about protection.
It's all about keeping a body safe.
It's the result of over-identification with the body.
And, so, it's what Colin Wilson talked about when he wrote so brilliantly about being trapped in left brain consciousness. Is that we are trapped in a very small part of the brain that is there only to keep us safe. So, therefore, we see most outside events as threats.
We see a bad driver as a threat to our well-being. And when somebody doesn't answer our email, we see it as a threat to our financial life or a threat to our career or a threat to our need to be loved and approved of. Money and love! We could lose it all if we're not ever-vigilant! If we don't habituate into the robot.
As Colin Wilson so eloquently describes in Poetry and Mysticism, we form our habits of social safekeeping and turn them over to the robot. The robot drives our car, and does most everything else. (A robot cannot and will not dream, though, which is why most dreams occur at night when we are asleep. Lawrence of Arabia said we ought to beware of someone who dreams during the day, while fully awake. That person will achieve great things.)
Most of the time our robot sees threats where there are no threats.
So, let's say a guy is trying to drive his pregnant wife to the hospital and I see him as a total jerk who's jeopardizing my safety on the highway and I'm flipping him off and I'm honking and yelling obscenities. I am inappropriately dysfunctional in my anger.
This trapped ego is what Seth Godin sometimes calls the "lizard brain," which comes from Robert Bly's wonderful book, Leaping Poetry. The lizard brain is just the amygdala, the survival part of the brain.
But if I recognize that that's where my current threat-based thoughts are coming from and I can be awake to it, I won't get caught up in this flashing anger.
I won't try to justify it. The time and energy it takes to create a good case for justifiable anger is time and energy I could have spent making money. My friend Sam Beckford (my co-author of 100 Ways to Create Wealth) used to flash with anger about conditions in Africa. The drinking water was unfit for humans. Now he has evolved and become enlightened. He puts all that formerly wasted time and energy into creating money. Then he donates the money to groups that build wells in Africa.
Anger is a war you declare on yourself.
That warrior instinct is better turned toward money. I call it being a wealth warrior, but you can call it being a charitable donor and a philanthropist if certain words don't work for you.
People feel flashes of anger because they're coming from the lizard brain but they are so obsessed with being "consistent" and being approved of that they'll add a lot of mental energy to justifying their anger. To really building a case for why they should be angry.
Here's why I'm so upset with you. Let me count the ways. I've been working on this presentation. I've put a lot of days into it. Weeks, even. Sit down. Bring your lawyer maybe. This could be my masterpiece of self-justification.
If you really understood that this flash of anger was an expression of a lower part of you, that's actually a survival-based protective thing, you could learn to let it flare out immediately like a match. Or a flash bulb. (Do they have those anymore?)
See it as a radar system in you that's always looking for threats to your well-being. What's wrong with that? It's built in there to keep you alive! It's not a negative thing.
It only becomes negative when it takes over everything. When it becomes your whole experience of "you." Feelings that need justification.
I prefer living an unjustified life.
The first step is to notice that you don't have to take every little flash of anger and spend the rest of your life justifying it.
That's where people really go wrong. That's where they make themselves dysfunctional and reduce the chance for inner strength to be growing. It's in that ongoing justification: like, the family members who call and say, "Can you believe that Josh didn't even show up at Thanksgiving?" Now all of us are on the phone talking about it. And what this is is an attempt to justify and get support for that feeling of anger that was so uncomfortable.
But when I see it, and I can identify the flash as a passing biological blip, I am all of a sudden using my larger, fuller brain, including the right side of my brain, and the most creative part of me. I can now see that I was misusing my imagination in an effort to justify what the lower brain felt. And this was absolute madness because that part of the brain, the creative imagination, could be creating the wealth and health I wanted. But instead it's caught up in justifying the anger that I feel.
But once I can see this, I've got freedom. First the freedom, then the prosperity.
My dream is that we begin to see this worldwide. I'll do my part, starting with this blog.
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The Making of a Bestseller
Steve Chandler's Authors' Roundtable June 29, Phoenix, Arizona, 8am to 5pm. For published authors (self-published and traditionally published, OR have a finished manuscript that we can read).
How to write your breakout book, instead of simply your "next book."
How to do final edits on your book so that it changes from "a good book" to a bestseller. The writing process.
How to make use of Robert Frost's advice, "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader...No surprise for the author, no surprise for the reader."
Learn why your previous book had no tears and no surprises. Creative marketing and promotion of your book versus standard ineffective promo and marketing activity. Word of mouth marketing for today's world of interconnected "friends."
How to write and promote a bestseller.
This roundtable has limited seating around the table and is hosted by Steve Chandler, author of 32 books, and six bestsellers. Nine hundred dollars. Email to apply:stephendchandler@cs.com
