consciousness – Pam Grout

Your deed to the world’s most valuable real estate

December 21, 2017 17 Comments

“Eventually you will see that the real cause of problem is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes the problems.”—Michael Singer

mind

I’ve got a holiday gift that, should you choose to accept it, will change every aspect of your 2018. It’s a deed for an exclusive piece of real estate that needs nothing but your decision to chop up and carry away extraneous bits of debris.

This plot that you already own and have been tending for all the years of your life is your consciousness. It’s the sum total of your beliefs. It’s the thoughts you spend the 1440 minutes of each day animating into your life.

There’s probably a corner with beliefs about your body, about how it operates, what it needs, what it’s capable of. This part of your real estate, which seems inescapable, gets a lot of attention. Most of us use it as a mask, as a shield to keep our true selves hidden and to keep the largesse of the universe from getting in. It’s a tiny, tiny piece of who we really are.

There’s also a dusty basement in your real estate that’s cluttered with beliefs you picked up from your culture. This lineup of beliefs includes things like what is and isn’t socially acceptable. Your need to be liked. Your beliefs about your gender, your race.

Your family, of course, left a few boxes down in that dusty basement, as well.

There’s the room with your beliefs about money. Is it hard to come by? Is there more where that came from?

I can’t stress enough how important this piece of real estate is. Your consciousness, your expenditure of your 1440 minutes per day determines everything.

You can use it to create your own beliefs, your own vision. Or you can continue stepping around and dealing with the debris.

Each and every one of us gets to decide how we spend our consciousness.

I heard an interview with the incomparable Terry Crews last night. He’s a former NFL football player, one of the stars of Brooklyn 911 and a recent Time Magazine “Person of the Year.” Even though he grew up with an abusive father in Flint, Michigan where, as he says, he DID drink the water, he made the decision to take control of the real estate of his consciousness.

He decided that, despite the limitations his culture and his hood tried to brainwash into him, he was going to take charge and interpret his life on his own terms. He decided to create opportunities and possibilities.

He decided to BE what he wanted to be—before there was any evidence that reality could be true. That decision to take charge of the deed of his unique real estate completely changed his life. He went from the hood in poverty-stricken Flint to being a huge movie star and artist.

Never forget. It’s your consciousness. It’s your deed.

Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the just-released, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side.

What’s in your hologram?

August 1, 2016 15 Comments

“The separated ones have invented many “cures” for what they believe to be “the ills of the world.” But the one thing they do not do is question the reality of the problem.”–A Course in Miracles

We live in a quantum age where people can instantaneously text each other across the planet, repair detached retinas with nothing but laser beams and use little handheld devices to get money-saving Groupons.

Yet, in our thinking, our applications of these new truths, we’re lagging sorely behind. We’re still using industrial age thinking. We’re not using the incredible power of our consciousness. Our consciousness that can and does create worlds.

We’re more than a century into this new quantum reality and we’ve barely budged in our thinking. We haven’t even begun to use these startling new processes in our personal lives. Instead, we invest our thoughts, our power, if you will, in victimhood, in this idea that life happens to us. Our consciousness is mired in old ways of doing things, old ways of thinking.

This warped view of reality wouldn’t be an issue if our thoughts were mere puffs of smoke, blown away by the next breeze.

But our thoughts are insanely powerful.

Like radio signals, our thoughts broadcast our beliefs and expectations out into the quantum field (or what I like to call the Field of Infinite Potentiality) and bring back into our lives an exact vibrational match.

Quantum physicists have proven that it’s impossible for us to look at anything without impacting the thing we’re looking at. It’s called the observer effect and while it has wreaked havoc on everything we thought we knew about the way the world works, it’s actually quite exciting. Because it means:

1. We’re not stuck with the 3-D reality we think is reality.
2. We’re not helpless victims.

What we now know is that everything we think is an objective world “out there” is nothing but a reflection of what exists in here. And by “in here” I mean the consciousness that is doing the observing.

Frank shared a wonderful story yesterday at my Possibility Posse that illustrates this perfectly.

He was subbing at one of the middle schools here in Lawrence. He was running late, didn’t have time to get still, to get his spiritual game on. First period came and went.

“Man,” he thought to himself, “this middle school has the worst kids I’ve ever taught.”

Luckily, the next period was what they call “planning period.”

Since he was a sub and didn’t have anything to plan, he took the 50 minutes and meditated.

And guess what? The kids in periods three through sixth were “the best kids he ever had.”

Remember, folks, the world we see out there is a hologram of what’s in our consciousness.

Pam Grout is the author of 18 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the about to be released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy

Is it a fact or just a long-held cultural belief?

February 4, 2016 68 Comments

“Withdraw your faith in distortions and invest in only what is true.”—A Course in Miracles

Web MD and other “authorities” will tell you that you need eight hours of sleep, that there’s a disease called seasonal affective disorder (SAD) that inflicts havoc every winter and that gaining weight is inevitable if you don’t rigorously watch what you eat.

But what if these beliefs are nothing but false ideas that we’ve made true by believing in them, by investing in them, by holding them as scientific fact?

If indeed consciousness provides the scaffolding for the physical world (and I, for one, happen to believe it does) then putting energy into any “belief” encrusts it into physical form. Quantum physicists can tell you “reality” is “curvy” or “straight” depending on what you expect.

Most of us can buy that we have some power over our own reality, but we don’t make the correlation that groupthink, those “facts” that our culture, our medical community, our media tout as true are also nothing but temporary forms of what we call “reality.”

One of the many things I love about my power posses (the groups I meet with on a regular basis) is that we share stories that defy “groupthink.” We share stories that the ancients might have called miracles. Hearing these stories opens my mind to accept a different reality.

Yesterday, Bettie told a story that shook me to the core. Being shaken to the core, by the way, is a good thing.

Bettie used to be a birthing assistant, what some might call a midwife. Giving birth, like most things, comes with a lot of “beliefs.” It’s painful. It takes hours. Pain meds and such things as epidurals are necessary and now days synonymous with the delivery room.

But one day, a new mom just going into labor informed Bettie, “I’m going to have this baby in less than 30 minutes.”

Bettie nodded and thought to herself, “O-kay! You obviously haven’t heard that first babies (and this WAS the young mom’s first baby) don’t usually pop out on demand.”

But this mom was insistent. “That’s how my mom did it and that’s how I’m going to do it.”

Bettie said there was some sitcom playing on the hospital room TV.

“And sure enough,” Bettie said, “that insistent mom gave birth before the credits rolled.”

I, who spent 17 hours in labor, loved this story. Why not take control over your body? Why not have a baby during an episode of “Friends?”

Another friend of mine from England told me giving birth to her daughter, Orca, was a spiritual, orgasmic experience? Why not?

Who’s to say what is and isn’t possible? Do we want to believe what the widely-expanding DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) tells us? Do we want to believe what pharmaceutical companies insist we need? Do we want to continue to believe that what happened yesterday is going to happen again today?

Or do we want to create a new day, a new reality, a new world?

In E-Squared, I told the story of yoga teacher Alan Finger who, when he was a teenager, lost 100 pounds in one month. It’s not the story we’re used to.

Many readers, in fact, had a hard time believing it. But it’s true. I called Alan Finger and I’ve talked to Katrina Repka who wrote the book that documented it.

And it’s as true as anything we continue to invest our thoughts and beliefs in.

If indeed consciousness is the clay, I hereby propose that we gather that Play-Doh back into a big ball and start all over.

What long-held “fact” are you willing to let go of? Or to at least consider that maybe, just maybe it’s not a “fact” but a flimsy belief.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and its equally-scintillating sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Magic and Miracles is your Full-Time Gig

Is it time to tune into a new radio station?

May 9, 2015 20 Comments

“At every point in time,
there are infinite possibilities
and a parallel reality exists for each possibility.”
–Daniel Jackson, Stargate

Imagine this? A foreign exchange student from a tiny African village with no running water or electricity comes to the West and gets dropped off at a hotel room. The hotel maid, who has a giant crush on George Strait and loves to listen to the local country and western station, forgot to turn off the radio when she finished tidying up the room. Hours later, the student walks into his first hotel room ever to find a radio playing non-stop country and western music and loud, obnoxious ads.

He much prefers the drumming of his little village, but unfortunately he has no idea that a) the radio has an off switch or b) that, at any time, he could simply move the dial to a different, more pleasing station.

Hopefully, the above scenario has never happened, but it’s a perfect metaphor for life. An extensive line-up of music stations with an immense variety of options is available for anyone with a car, a boom box or a computer with Pandora.

Life, too, offers a dizzying choice of consciousness options. We can choose joyful thoughts or thoughts of fear. We can choose to celebrate or worry. The station we tune into is completely up to us. It’s the most important decision we ever make. Our consciousness channels create the quality of our life.

Most of us are like the exchange student, stuck on one channel and unaware that, at any time, we could pick a different reality. We are the captains of our fate, the master of our mind’s channels that all too often get stuck on an endless loop.

Before long, we start believing that reality is nothing but the loud, obnoxious C&W station playing in our consciousness. We fail to realize that a) there’s an off-switch, b) there are lots of other channels and c) the world only appears the way it does because, in our ignorance, we chose the wrong channel. Isn’t it time to change the dial?

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the recently-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.

The four major stages of reality-shaping consciousness–where’s your tent pitched?

January 14, 2015 25 Comments

“Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.”
― Eckhart Tolle

Our consciousness shapes and molds the reality that plays out in our lives. And there are many levels of consciousness, each with different rules, principles, characteristics and attributes.

For example, if you reside in the victim consciousness (“Things happen TO me,” “Life sucks and then you die” are a few standard thoughts from this level.), you can affirm and intend all you want, but your consciousness, the driver of your reality, which believes affirmations and intentions are a bunch of hooey always gets the last word. When you spend most of your waking hours in that consciousness (and it’s a very popular consciousness), your channels are plugged up. All the good that wants to come your way can’t get through.

Because we live in a multi-dimensional universe, there are dozens of different levels of consciousness, oftentimes residing in one person. For the purpose of this discussion, I’ve broken it down into four major consciousness categories. Each of these levels has dozens of subsets, all that play out in different ways in our lives. Let’s just say that my goal is to move closer to level four.

1. “The damn, not again” consciousness. The starting gate for most of us is some manifestation of victim consciousness. It varies from person to person, but the over-arching theme is we have no control over anything that happens in our life. The best we can do is work really hard, cross our fingers and hope that all the “shit” we hear about out there will somehow escape us.

2. “The woo-hoo! This is getting cool!” consciousness. One of the next levels (again it plays out differently in each person) is where we realize we have a say. We learn there are energetic laws that are just as reliable as physical laws. We discover that our thoughts are units of mental energy that play out in the world just as powerfully as the principles of gravity or aerodynamics.

Usually we move in and out of this consciousness, mixing it up with other levels. We still feel separate and still retain some of that “poor me” consciousness. In fact, we spend nearly as much time talking about what we don’t want as what we do. We still believe the things we want are out there, in the future, something we have to strive for.

3. The “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” consciousness. I am very happy to report that I spent nearly the entire year of 2013 in this consciousness. I got up every morning, celebrating, feeling good. I got up on the right side of the bed nearly every morning and boy, did things come to fruition for me. My book hit the New York Times bestseller list. I traveled to six different countries on four different continents. I got all kinds of new writing gigs. Editors contacted ME which, if you’re a freelance writer, you’d know never happens. I got emails from people all over the world, telling me how much they liked my book. And while all that was really cool and I’m intending it to happen again in 2014, the best part really was how blessed I felt.

And this is where the distinction should be made. People believe they will be happy when they achieve a certain level of success, when they find the perfect lover, when they heal from cancer. But that’s not how it works. All those things are byproducts of being happy.

This is one chicken vs. the egg that is not in question. Being grateful, being happy, feeling blessed ALWAYS comes first. In fact, most people say that when their “stuff” finally comes, the material things they got into this “thoughts creating reality” business in the first place they realize they’re beside the point. And that the gift, the real gift, is the joy they now see in the little things—the cute little heart the barista made into the foam on the latte, the squirrel running along the fence in glee, the softness of cashmere sweater you pull over your head.

4. “I am one with all” consciousness. In this consciousness, which I must admit is not yet a 24/7 theme for moi, there is no sense of separation from anything. This consciousness knows it is one with Source. It knows it’s an indelible part of the F.P. It knows you are an unlimited being, hooked up with all that is. In this consciousness, everything is eternal and everything else (your thoughts, your reality) is subservient to this bottom-line spiritual Truth. When we’re lucky enough to view life from this consciousness, we are totally surrendered to the “all that is” and know nothing is missing from our life. And, in fact, by yielding to that consciousness, by giving it permission to play out in our lives, we come to realize that all those little intentions and manifestations we so dutifully held in our consciousness are small potatoes compared to this. It’s so much bigger and grander and woo-hoo’er than anything we could have ever imagined.

It’s the year to change the pre-set buttons in your consciousness

January 6, 2015 18 Comments

“Do a loony-goony dance ’
Cross the kitchen floor.  
Put something silly in the world.
 That ain’t been there before.”—Shel Silverstein

Car radios have buttons to pre-set favorite stations, making it easy to find, say KKFI and KPRS. Our minds work the same way. We program in certain “experiences” on our pre-set buttons and then we forget (or don’t allow) anything else.

But just so you know. THERE. IS. SO. MUCH. MORE.

I loved this story that came in this morning. And, yes, it falls into the SO.MUCH.MORE category.

A woman in Norway was doing The Dude Abides experiment from E-Squared, the one where you ask for a sign from the higher intelligence. Here’s her story:

“When I decorated the Xmas tree this year I noticed that the star on top no longer worked to my disappointment. In Norway we have a Xmas song where one of the lines goes like this: “And high in the top of the tree the shining star, that shines to remind us of our God” But my star did not shine this year.

“Then I did the first exercise and said, “Ok God, send me a sign or a blessing within the next 48 hours. And I started looking everywhere for a sign, I walked into traffic signposts and walls because I was looking after a sign.

“When it was only two hours left of the 48 hours, I sat on my sofa and thought that it did not work, I had not seen any signs, but then it happened- the star in top of my tree suddenly started shining (the light suddenly started working) and I almost fell off my sofa.

“All the Xmas without the shining star, and then on the day I was going to pack away the tree, (and with two hours left of the experiment) it started to shine.”

Needless to say, she left the tree (with the shining star) up for a couple more days.

So, even though most of us have pre-set the button that says, “things that are broken are broken forever,” she found a whole different radio station with a whole different song.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the just-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.

“Reality” is a mental construct–make yours joyful

May 9, 2014 10 Comments

Thought for the day:

Our beliefs are cultural constructs and only as “true” as the investment we place in them. Reality is malleable and formed from consciousness. We can either join lockstep with the cultural paradigm or we can create our own reality, our own path.

We’re all in ruts, but we can break free. In fact, there’s great support from the universe once you begin walking in that direction.

Pam Grout is the author of 17 books including E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality and the soon-to-be-released sequel, E-Cubed, 9 More Experiments that Prove Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.

Four major stages of consciousness–where’s your tent pitched?

May 6, 2014 30 Comments

“Being spiritual has nothing to do with what you believe and everything to do with your state of consciousness.”
― Eckhart Tolle

When first crafting the spiritual/energy principles to be tested in E-Squared, I spent many an hour pondering the wording. On several, I stated “your thoughts and your consciousness” impact….this or that.

Part of me wondered, “Isn’t that redundant?” Writers would rather poke knitting needless in their eyes than be redundant. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that thoughts and consciousness, while certainly joined at the hip, are two different animals.

Thoughts are derived from our consciousness, but it’s our consciousness that provides the framework, the meat, the juice, the final answer. It’s the level of our consciousness that shapes and molds the reality that plays out in our lives. And there are many levels of consciousness, each with different rules, principles, characteristics and attributes.

It’s too late to undrink the kool-aid

April 23, 2014 22 Comments

“Pain is purposeless, without a cause and with no power to accomplish anything.”–A Course in Miracles

WordPress tells me that this blog post is my 200th since I began blogging 15 months ago. What a fabulous ride it has been. Despite my initial resistance, I discovered that I love blogging about these topics. Writing these posts is one of many highlights of my day.

The number 200 seems like a reason to celebrate and since I’m busy packing for my bucket list-crossing-off trip to Kenya tomorrow, I thought I’d post a sneak preview of the experiments you’ll be hearing about in E-Cubed, the sequel to E-Squared. I’d love to hear below what you think of these corollaries to the 9 principles of E-Squared.

Experiment # 1: The Red Pill Corollary or a Quick Refresher Course

Life emanates from me.

Experiment # 2: The Simon Cowell Corollary or Why you’re not Capable of Judging Anything

Nothing is absolute. Only our thinking makes it so.

Experiment #3: The “Everyone’s your Gayle King” Corollary or There is no “Them”

Being in love with everyone and everything brings you in alignment with the F.P.

Experiment #4: “Your new B.F.F. Corollary or “Money, it’s not complicated.”

Money is nothing but energy and a reflection of your beliefs

Experiment #5: The “Nature Vs. News” Corollary

The field of infinite potentiality offers a Divine 24/7 buzz.

Experiment #6: The “If you say so” Corollary or Your Words are the Wand that Shape your Life

You bring abundance and joy into your life once you stop talking smack about it.

Experiment #7: The Boogie-Woogie Corollary or The Importance of Not Being Earnest

The more fun you have, the better life works.

Experiment # 8: The Right Side of the Bed Corollary or The ten most important minutes of your day

Without cultural training, joy is your natural state.

Experiment # 9: The Ya-ba-da-ba-do Corollary

Life is miraculous and you can’t really die. Furthermore, transcendence is inevitable.

Appendix: The Bonus Marriage of Cana Experiment or It’s time to get D-O-W-N!!!

Is the radio station in your head stuck on a self-defeating channel? Maybe it’s time to pick a better song.

January 18, 2013 No Comments

Pam Grout is the author of E-Squared, 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality. And she chose to write about radio stations today in honor of next week’s debut on Hay House Radio.