Manifest Your Destiny: The Nine Spiritual Principles for Getting Everything You Want

I encourage you to follow these suggestions for developing this first principle as a permanent part of your total awareness. This plan of action worked for me. If I encounter doubt, I return to this four-point plan. It always reacquaints me with the highest self.

HOW TO KNOW YOUR HIGHEST SELF WITHOUT ANY DOUBT

1: Here is a great definition of enlightenment: to be immersed in and surrounded by peace.

Your highest self only wants you to be at peace. It does not judge, compare or demand that you defeat anyone, or be better than anyone. It only wants you to be at peace. Whenever you are about to act, ask yourself this question: “Is what I am about to say or do going to bring me peace?” If the answer is yes, then go with it and you will be allowing yourself the wisdom of your highest self. If the answer is no, then remind yourself that it is your ego at work.

The ego promotes turmoil because it wants to substantiate your separateness from everyone, including God. It will push you in the direction of judgment and comparison, and cause you to insist on being right and best. You know your highest self by listening to the voice that only wants you to be at peace.

2: Go beyond the restriction of the physical plane. The purpose of the highest self is to assist you in this effort. You do this by creating an inner sanctuary that is yours and yours alone. Go to this silent inner retreat as often as you can, and let go of all attachments to the external world of the ego.

As you go to this sanctuary, a light will be born within you that you will come to know and respect. This light is your connection to the energy of manifestation. It is like taking a bath in pure light; you will feel this energy as you go silently within. This light is not of the earth plane. It will help you go beyond the physical world. Remember, you cannot go beyond the earth plane if you are still in it. The real you, the unseen you, can attract the energy of the sun, the wind and all that is celestial.

3: Refuse to defend yourself to anyone or anything on the earth plane. You must learn to stay within your higher energy pattern regardless of what goes before you in the material world. This means that you become like an unknown sage who refuses to lock horns with anything on this physical plane.

This is the challenge of the highest self. It is beyond the reality system that you identify as material and as form. Use your inner light for your alignment and allow those who disagree with that perspective to have their own points of view. You are at peace. You never explain, and you refuse to flaunt your energy. You know it, and that is enough for you.

4: Finally, surrender and trust in the wisdom that created you. You are developing a faith that transcends the beliefs and teachings of others. This trust is your corner of freedom, and it will always be yours. In fact, it is so important that it is the subject of the second spiritual principle of manifestation, which you will read about when you turn to the next section.

Your highest self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

TRUSTING YOURSELF IS TRUSTING THE WISDOM THAT CREATED YOU (#ulink_b77b8a27-a9cd-54fb-8db6-e3ad6e033941)

The Second Principle (#ulink_b77b8a27-a9cd-54fb-8db6-e3ad6e033941)

Learning to trust may be difficult in the beginning. It will be an exercise in futility if you rely upon your mind to create trust. This is because the mind works on material problems by interpreting sensory data. When turned toward spiritual matters the mind attempts to come up with intellectual answers by using proofs, logic and theoretical reasoning. It demands assurance and proof to establish tangible results.

In contrast, the method of the heart, focused on spiritual understanding, is an intuitive recognition of the value of love. Whereas the mind attempts to know the spirit by setting up conditions that must be met logically for there to be a release of love, the heart employs intuitive love as its way. It is not a conclusion of reasoning. It is the way of spontaneity, not the result of bargaining with the intellect. The heart trusts the inner wisdom that it feels and spontaneously knows, whereas the mind demands scientific evidence before it will trust.

Most of us in the West have been taught that the center of our wisdom is in our heads. If you ask people where their ability to process thought and experience is, they will generally respond that it is in the brain. Ask consciously spiritual persons the same question and they will indicate the heart.

When the mind seeks corroboration through specific proofs as an aid to spiritual understanding, it is encroaching into an area far more suited to the heart. For this reason, it is necessary to trust what the heart knows. Without total trust, it is impossible to know the miracles of the higher self and become a manifester.

Spiritual life does not grow in the soil of intellectual information gathering. Spirituality needs the fertile ground of feelings, which the unseen dimension provides. Trusting your heart space is imperative for the growth of a healthy spiritual life.

This means cultivating a harmony between mind and heart, and for most of us this means terminating the intellect’s domination. The mind must surrender its role as full-time judge and allow the heart to contribute its wisdom. It is with this surrendering process that trust begins to flourish, replacing doubt.

Mistrust begins early in most human beings’ lives. It is helpful to realize why it is that the heart space has not been permitted to be the center of our being. Here are two theories describing our place in nature. I think you will agree that the first theory illuminates why mistrust of ourselves and our divine abilities is so deeply rooted.

TWO THEORIES OF NATURE THAT AFFECT OUR ABILITY TO TRUST

First Theory: Nature as a Mechanism

In the mechanistic view of nature, everything is an artifact made by a boss who has many different names. In the Western view, the boss is called God.

This God is often depicted as a white-bearded male who roams around the sky creating the natural world. In this theory, the world is a construct and God the constructor. This biblical God is paternal, authoritarian, beneficent and, in many ways, tyrannical. He keeps track of all things and knows precisely what everyone does and when his laws are being broken.

One of the operatives of this theory of nature is the idea of punishment for one’s sins. This God/father holds us accountable for transgressions. The transgressions are judged by various interpreters of his laws who throughout history have claimed access to the divine. Essentially, the universe is a monarchy, God the king and we the subjects. All subjects are considered born with the stain of sin as a part of their nature and are therefore untrustworthy.

This theory of nature makes many people feel estranged, creating an attitude of separateness from the boss. The more we feel separated from this God, the more we feel the need to create some way of feeling worthy. So we create an idea of our importance based on externals and call it “ego.”

Reliance on ego ultimately leads to more separation as life becomes a contest and a competition with designated others. But the sense of estrangement is partially assuaged with an ego-directed attitude of “us against them.” People are categorized and evaluated on the basis of “egonomics,” which includes appearance, tradition, language and physical characteristics.

I believe that the most troubling thing built into this theory of nature is the impact it has on our ability to operate from a strong position of self-trust. Once convinced that you are untrustworthy and basically a sinner, you are quite lost. If you are untrustworthy, how can you trust in even your untrustworthiness? You can’t!

Everything becomes subject to doubt when God is a vindictive boss. This leads to the confusion of doubting everything because our opinions, feelings and beliefs are untrustworthy. In this scenario, one cannot even maintain trust in God because of a basic mistrust of ourselves. And not trusting in that God may be breaking one of his laws. It is a no-win situation.

This theory of the untrustworthiness of nature, popular as it is, is absolutely incompatible with the second principle of manifestation. You cannot tune into the power and energy of the universe to create and attract an abundant life if that energy and power is outside you.

Second Theory: Nature as Spontaneous and Nonjudging

In this spontaneous view, God is universal intelligence flowing through everything, inspiring the natural process to unfold. The emphasis is on awareness of the divine nature in everything rather than managing and controlling the natural world. The life force is nonjudgmental and is responsible for all creation.

In this theory, nature is an unforced unfolding of life forms and there is no “boss.” Rather than learning to manage and control the natural world, the impulse is to trust it. God, in this theory, loves all things.

Human beings are an aspect of this God and are, therefore, carriers of divinity. Generally, in this theory, human beings are considered the highest level of life form. Trusting this most evolved natural human includes trusting the paradox of behavior described as good and bad, selfish and unselfish, greedy and generous in the same manner as we respect other life forms by trusting their processes.

There is no need to invent an ego that is separate from the divine if our basic human nature is trusted. If we trust ourselves, we know how to avoid interfering with nature and how to live in harmony. When we know God as an unseen, loving and accepting power at the heart of everything, allowing us to make our own choices, then God is a trusted part of our nature.

I believe that our nature is much more reliable than our thoughts. This second principle directs us to develop an inner knowing so that the natural process of what we desire also desires us. Consider how our biological system attracts what is needed for hair to grow, food to digest, fingernails to be hard or breasts to be soft without our thoughts directing the process. Thinking can often lead us astray, while our nature unfolds in the form of amazingly well-functioning bodies and minds. When you trust this natural process, you begin to trust the nature of all things. The God within all informs your trusting response to life.

The order of nature itself is sometimes crooked and sometimes straight. It is wiggly and unorthodox, as seen in the shapes of clouds or mountains. They are not in any pattern that we can perceive, and they are perfect. When we insist on controlling nature, we are interfering with nature.

The need to straighten out nature shows distrust. But when we relax and embrace the infinite variations of the universe, we are allowing the divinity of nature to flow and unfold through our life. We have tuned in to the divine.

Think of yourself as a consciousness being played out by God just as a wave is a part of the ocean that is being played out by the ocean. This theory of nature will promote the kind of trust that you need to attract to yourself all that belongs to you in the universe. This unseen, divine energy is the ocean that your wave form is a part of. You can call it God, ocean or, for that matter, anything else.

This is a profoundly exquisite realization because with it you bring to your consciousness the inner awareness that you are actually in all things. This leads to miraculous manifestations, in that you are actually connected to all that you desire to manifest, and finally you know this to be your truth.

BEING IN ALL THINGS AT ONCE

Authentic trust is only available through the knowing heart. When you enter this trusting space, everything will come to you that belongs to you because you have created the inner capacity to receive it. The irony is that what you wish to receive is a part of you. This can be a troublesome concept to grasp because of the ego’s attachment to being separate and special.

Nothing in your rational mind could ever convince you that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. It appears to be a fluid that flows and has nothing to do with gases. But when we subject water to scrutiny, its constituent elements become manifest. And so it is with the idea of being in all things at once.

Nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason to believe that our mind has as one of its constituents something invisible that is in all living things. Yet when we examine our life force, using quantum mechanics, we find that this energy is, indeed, not a particle but a wave that is the same in all life.

You trust in the universal energy when you accept this “irrational” fact: At your basic core you are not only worthy of trust, but you are the life force that exists everywhere. If you truly trust in this notion, you realize that everything that you perceive as missing in your life is a part of the same energy that you are. Manifesting becomes the art of bringing to yourself that which is already you.

In a sense it is like thinking of the things you want as being on a string that is infinitely long, but is nevertheless attached to you in some invisible way. It is only a matter of trusting that you can bring that string to you and that whatever is supposed to come to your life will be there when you have developed the capacity to receive it. But the trick is, you cannot receive it or even come close to manifesting it if you have an absence of trust in yourself as an extension of God.

I like to think of God as the ocean and myself as a glass. If I dip the glass into the ocean, I will have a glass full of God. No matter how I analyze this, it will still contain God. Now, the glass of God is not as big as the ocean, nor is it omniscient or omnipotent, but it is still God. This metaphor allows me to trust both in myself and simultaneously in the wisdom that created me, and to see the oneness.

I have deliberately chosen not to use many quotations in this book. But I want to emphasize that every spiritual master and all of the saints, teachers, gurus or priests throughout history have espoused similar advice. This perennial philosophy connects all humanity, from tribal and ancient to civilized and present times. It is the message that God is within and outside every living thing. Also, there is a world we are a part of that is not subject to the changing world of time and space. Moreover, we are presently a part of that invisible spiritual world.

Since it is everywhere, it is not only within you, it is you. The meaning of this is that God is not to be found so much as discovered within yourself. The statement “You and the Father are one” is more than an ecclesiastical admonition. It is a statement of your reality.

With practice, you can learn to know this reality. You can learn to see the aura around all living things. You can learn to assist others by projecting your energy and giving them strength and sustenance. Actually, it is not a skill to learn so much as it is trusting the energy to be part of you.