REALIZING YOUR DREAMS: LESS WORK; MORE RESULTS

And we’ve had time think about how we are manifesting our dreams without those formal affirmative prayer practices. In addition to our hard-won experience,  we’ve come across new science,  and talked with with spirtual authors Mitch Horowitz, Gary Jansen and Kate Jegede. Diane and I are coming to the conclusion that less may mean more when it comes to manifestation. 

I don’t want to imply we are on easy street with all problems solved. This is life and life comes with challenges, but we also have greater possibilities than at any point in our lives.

Affirmative prayer in New Thought is sometimes described as ask, believe, receive. What if it’s closer to ask and receive and belief is less relevant?

We had a wonderful lunch with Katherine (Kate) Jegede in London. Kate is the author of the book “Infinite Possibility” based her journey with the teachings of Neville Goddard. Neville is the New Thought teacher I think comes closest to the less is more approach. Goddard’s method is simply to go into a relaxed state or to use the moments before falling asleep to visualize a symbol of a desired manifestation fulfilled. For example a ring on a finger could symbolize the desire fulfilled to find a spouse. It seems impossibly easy.

“Neville said it should be easy,” Kate told us.

I shared what I read of the mind-bending research of Dr. William Bengston who has run studies curing lab mice of a previously incurable cancer using volunteer hands-on healers. He deliberately sought out skeptics and used mice to separate his experiments from the placebo effect.

The results were astonishing. The mice were cured by the skeptics, and then the mice in the control group also began to be cured. Mice injected with cells from the cured mice were also healed. The mice themselves seemed to control the healing. When ill they moved towards the healer’s left hand. When cured they no longer sought the left hand.

“Neville said that everybody can this,” Kate told us. “It is for everyone not just a select few. That’s why he taught that it should be easy. It is an ability we all have.”

It’s not only the lack of belief of the healers that runs counter to conventional wisdom, but also the nature of the healing. Rather than the cancer disappearing, the tumors expanded, grew and then imploded before leaving. Had the healing conformed with the expectations of the healers it would have simply disappeared, says Bengston.

At least a particular type of intention.  The intention for Bengston’s skeptic healers was lightly held and did not involve force of will. He placed healers in MRI tubes and observed the switches in the brain when intentions were lightly held.

The healers set a gentle intention. Their brains went into phase lock with the healees at some distance from the MRI machine. In another experiment the researchers handed envelopes one at a time to the healers in the MRI. The envelopes were randomly ordered and held hair samples and photos of dogs and horses ill with cancer and the same items for healthy animals. When they held envelopes with the hair and photos of sick animals the intention circuits switched on even though they had no conscious knowledge of the envelopes content.

Bengston stresses that the healers trained in his method don’t go into a deeply meditative or altered state that many believe is the sine qua non of energy healing or manifestation work. Instead they do what is termed rapid image cycling, practicing a series of images of things they want, that they then run through at great speed, sometimes several a second. It could be holding the steering wheel of a dream car followed by a dinner at a favorite restaurant and so on.

The techniques are similar to Neville’s and have nothing to do with healing. But the healings occur, of people as well as animals, and as a side effect, the healers manifest many of their wants. Neither the healing or the desired manifestations require any great effort once his method is learned. He admits that learning rapid image cycling does take discipline.

As our friend Dennis, who manifests great abundance, told us. “Just hold the intention lightly, playfully. It’s fun!” In Mitch’s new book, The Miracle Club, he tells of writing down a specific amount of money to be received by a given date as a goal. He put the paper in a book and forgot about it. When he came upon it after the original goal date he realized his money goals had come to pass by the goal date. He also writes in the book, “Sometimes a state of ease and hopeful expectancy is itself sufficient to bring us what we want, or to help.”

When Diane had her multiple and ultimately life-saving surgeries we would get through the hard times talking about how we would dance at the Eiffel Tower. It became, for us, like one of Neville’s concrete and simple symbols for the life we wanted. For Diane’s Christmas I photoshopped a picture of us with the Eiffel Tower. You can see that photoshop below paired with us at the real thing.

I did the same for a gondola ride in Venice for Valentine’s Day in 2017 using a photo from a ride in a Las Vegas casino in 2015. Last spring the ideal became a reality and we visited Venice. Once again, it served as a Neville-like symbol for us. While we enjoyed the images on those special days, we didn’t revisit them after. It was only after achieving our goals that we looked back.

 AFFIRMATIONS

If you prefer affirmations, think more of an evocative poem  and metaphor, such as the Sufi mystic poet Rumi, rather than linear, concrete language. That is the symbolic effect we are going for.

Similarly, with TM training you are given a mantra. You are better off, it is said, not knowing the meaning of the mantra, and are taught to let it run through the mind with little effort, giving it bare attention. It’s just a placeholder for the conscious mind.

The chaos magician Gordon White has said that manifestation work my have more in common with the famous Stanford remote viewing experiments than elaborate visualizations and affirmations that speak to the conscious mind. These experiments were at the peak of the Cold War and the remote viewers were trying to get a handle on Russian military capabilities.

The researchers found that the remote viewers  accuracy improved when they were given coordinates of longitude and latitude even though they had no conscious idea what the coordinates meant or where they were located. If they were given more information the conscious mind got in the way and fabricated irrelevant mental images. Later the viewers were given randomly assigned labels of letters and numbers to represent a target in a way that would be meaningless to their conscious minds. That also improved the results, the researcher Dean Radin writes in his book Real Magic.

This can also be found in the Science of Mind philosophy. Rev. Dr. Edward Viljoen writes that Religious Science affirmative prayer begins with realizing our Oneness with all creation and then affirmations followed by acceptance. The effort is not ours, he says on his blog. “… remember that you and I don’t put the power into a prayer; rather, there is a spiritual Law of Mind that acts upon our thoughts. This should relieve us of any sense of effort.”

 In light of Bengston’s findings, what role does accessing spiritual consciousness play? Does it provide the confidence to get the conscious mind out of the way?

Whatever is happening via Neville’s method, Bengston’s healings, chaos magic or remote viewing, it seems to require very little if anything from the conscious mind.

It does indeed seem, that when it comes to manifestation, less is more.

See my post We Make the Road by Walking here.

See Kate Jaegede’s post Neville and the Magic of Certainty here.

See Mitch Horowitz’s post Neville Goddard: A Cosmic Philosopher here.

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