“When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small.”—Hank Green
You’ve probably heard it: Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” The all-time favorite line of my monkey mind (the Course calls it my ego) is “I like big but’s and I cannot lie.”
Monkey mind doesn’t just LIKE big but’s. It throws them out like parade floats toss candy.
Here’s an example:
Spiritual wisdom tells me I’m love, light, peace and joy.
Ego’s big but: But you often feel like the possum that got hit by the Range Rover over on Lyons Street.
It’s Monday and I want to dive into an ambitious new project.
Ego’s big but: But it’s already 10:41 and you’re just getting started.
My intention: To see my TV series produced.
Ego’s big but: But you live in Kansas…..
My highest belief: Taz and I are eternally connected. Remember the Henry Scott-Holland poem, the line about her just being in the next room?
Ego’s big but: But she’s not available to go for coffee.
Luckily, I’m on to the ego’s theme song. Instead of buying into its “big but nonsense,” I choose to focus on love and light, to launch my new project anyway, to keep believing in my TV series and to continue meditating with Taz every morning.
Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her latest book, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side.
“Man’s concept of his world built on the experience of the five senses is no longer adequate and in many cases no longer valid.”— Shafica Karagulla
Right now, the planet you call home is spinning at a rate of roughly 930 miles per hour. It’s orbiting the sun at an astonishing 66,486 miles per hour. But unless you just polished off a couple pitchers of beer, you probably aren’t aware of any such movement. That’s just one tiny example of how we distort reality.
ACIM Lesson 92 tells us that we see what we decide to see—nothing else, more more.
Very early on—say, sometime around birth—our minds establish a pattern of perception and then proceed to filter out everything else. In other words, we only “experience” things that jibe with our very limited perception.
I told the story in E-Squared about a girl from the Philippines who told me that it was weeks, if not months, after she arrived in the United States before she noticed that some people here had red hair, including people she knew and dealt with on a regular basis. Red hair was inconsistent with what she had been conditioned to see and expect. So for several months, she was subjectively blind to red hair, seeing it as the brunette of her culture.
Our brains are designed to be efficient, not accurate. Our brains are designed to show us a hologram of our beliefs and expectations. So we take the 400 billion bits of information that are offered each second and we begin screening. We begin narrowing.
I’ll take that bit of information over there, and let’s see—this one fits nicely with my ongoing soap opera about the opposite sex.
ACIM Lesson 92 tells us that all our concepts and judgment, all things we take for granted are distortions and that TRUE seeing only come through light. This lesson reminds us that we’d all roll over laughing if we really understood the nature and insanity of what passes for thought.
When we see through our eyes (which basically report a likeness of our flesh suits, a carbon copy of our beliefs) we see weakness, lack and division.
But there is another way of seeing. Through the strength of our light.
Today, I’m grateful that as I give up the “hologram” I see with my eyes, I will begin to see the radiance, the brilliance and the love that shows up in light.
Pam Grout is the author of 19 books including E-Squared, E-Cubed, Thank & Grow Rich and her new book, Art & Soul,Reloaded: A Year-Long Apprenticeship to Summon the Muses and Ignite Your Daring, Audacious, Creative Side.
“He contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.” —Patti Smith, singer, poet and visual artist I’ve been thinking a lot about first generation reality, something that’s a rare commodity these days. First generation reality is what life looks like without all the filters. The filters are the yellow waxy buildup that stops us from seeing the light within every situation, that prevent us from seeing people as they really are—beautiful souls who want nothing but to love and give of their gifts.
When my dog Izzy was a puppy, she ran full speed ahead to every single canine she saw, wagging her tail, wanting to make a new buddy. There were no exceptions to her joy and exuberance.
This is how we would be, too, (running to every other member of the human race in joyful glee) if we hadn’t condensed first generation reality into our very limited perception.
Every person has immense light and love inside them (no exceptions) and the only reason we cannot see it is because of the lens we laid over it. We covered it up with our beliefs and expectations, with facts that we just KNOW are true. We made a judgment and assume we know what that Republican is up to or that Democrat wants to do to destroy our freedom.
Nothing is as it appears. All we see with the limited five senses is a hologram of our beliefs and expectations. And it’s flawed and it’s getting us in trouble.
I heard about an amazing man yesterday who is doing his part to bridge the divide. His name is Daryl Davis. He’s a black musician whose early years were spent overseas in diverse classrooms. When his parents moved back to the United States, he, like most of the boys in his sixth grade class, joined Boy Scouts. One day, while marching with his troop, people started throwing rocks and sticks at him.
His first thought was, “They must not like Boy Scouts.”
At that point, his parents sat him down and had the race talk with him.
He was stunned.
“How could they not like me?” he thought. “They don’t even know me.”
Since that time, he has taken on the hobby of getting to know white supremacists and, instead of yelling at them, berating them, he sits down and asks questions. He genuinely wants to know what they think.
As he says about engaging his “enemies,” “When you are actively learning about someone else you are passively teaching them about yourself.”
In other words, he gets back to first generation reality. Some black activists call his methods crazy, but as he likes to say, “I’ve got dozens of retired hoods and robes in my closet. How many do you have?”
So, with my new hero, Daryl Davis, in mind, I’d like to share one of the party games from Thank and Grow Rich.
“Stop being boring and show the world what awesome looks like.” — ROBBY NOVAK, YOUTUBE’S KID PRESIDENT
What if every day we saw ourselves as powerful radio towers for joy, for love, for connection?
What if we adopted the attitude: “I am light, and I stand before you to love you.”
What if we took responsibility, within our own frequencies, for cleaning up toxic environments? What if we decided to emit goodness, to spew beauty?
So what if you don’t have the resources to be a philanthropist. Financial jackpots are only one (and not even the best one) of the resources in your portfolio. You can smile at people. Make conversations. Start up trivia contests in lines at the coffee shop. Make it your task today to emit molecules of happiness to every person you come in contact with. Make it your mission to uplift everyone you see.
Approach each person with this attitude: “I have been waiting to meet you all of my life.”
Happy Valentine’s Day, my fine-feathered friends.
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 recently released, Thank and Grow Rich: a 30-day Experiment in Shameless Gratitude and Unabashed Joy.
“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.
I’ve been thinking a lot about first generation reality, something that’s a rare commodity these days. First generation reality is what life looks like without all the filters. The filters are the yellow waxy buildup that stops us from seeing the light within every situation, that prevent us from seeing people as they really are—beautiful souls who want nothing but to love and give of their gifts.
