“It’s the stories we tell ourselves that cause all the problems. If you look reality straight in the eye, you end up a lot less confused.”—Nell Zink
So I gave myself an incredible gift over the holidays. It did not feel like a gift at the time. But it so powerfully reinforced everything I believe that I’m hoping I shan’t (wow! Where did that word come from?) dig it up again.
For whatever reason, I decided to pull out one of my old, treasured stories. It’s an Oscar-worthy tale with lots of drama, plenty of pathos and my body knows exactly what to do with it, starting with manufacturing and dumping an assortment of stress chemicals.
I put everything I had into this oh-so familiar pity party. And sure enough, it demonstrated, once again, the power of thoughts and beliefs. Life itself is stunningly beautiful—except when we put ourselves in the prisons of certain stories and beliefs. Our stories do indeed create worlds.
So here is my thankfully short-lived holiday tale. Instead of celebrating and reveling in all the wonderful holiday memories I have with my beautiful daughter, I decided to pout about the unfairness of the fact she’s no longer here. I put all my energy into the story that this was my fifth Christmas without my favorite person in the whole wide world. You can imagine the result.
I was grumpy to my partner. I was withdrawn at his family’s Christmas Eve feast. In other words, I suffered because I fed a thought that doesn’t look reality straight in the eye. I know good and well Taz isn’t really “gone.” Heck, I still talk to her every day. I feel her presence around me. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have spent 25 years of my life with her Divine being, right here in the material world.
The old story is compelling. As sad stories go, it gets five stars. Unless you live in Ukraine or say, Somalia, it’s hard to find a tale that garners more sympathy. But why choose to forfeit right here, right now with a belief that causes suffering.
I know people will say, “but you have the right to your emotions!” and, yes, I believe I do. But I also believe I deserve happiness and that I can curate which stories I choose to water and grow in my consciousness.
I’m grateful for this experience that offered more proof that we do indeed create our reality. And I remain committed to life that’s happening right now in this beautiful, never-to-be repeated moment. #222 Forever!
But remember, the flip side is also true. Your meaningful thoughts show you a meaningful world. This lesson begins to introduce the main thesis from my book, E-Squared. Your thoughts create your reality. Your thoughts determine the world you see.
And as you break to pieces the indoctrination and programming that currently holds you hostage, you get to see and experience a brand new world. You get to produce and direct a whole new movie.
And speaking of movies, here’s a song, I’ve adapted when I need to wash an old
thought out of my hair.
Have an epically extraordinary day, my epically extraordinary friends.
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.
“‘I should’, ‘I shouldn’t’, ‘you should’, ‘you shouldn’t’, ‘I want’, ‘I need’–these unquestioned thoughts distort the appearance of the good that is as common as grass. Reality won’t wait for your consent. It will remain just as it is, pure goodness, whether or not you understand.” –Byron Katie
Don’t know if you saw yesterday’s New York Times. But I’m wahooing and fist-bumping because the prestigious scientific journal Nature just published a huge study proving one of the principals I talk about in my books.
As you can imagine, not just everybody buys into the fact that things over here (say our thoughts) influence things over there.
But scientists at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands just proved one of quantum theory’s fundamental claims. Namely, that objects separated by great distance instantaneously affect each other’s behavior. Kinda a big blow to Isaac Newton and old-school physics.
Although these kind of non-local experiments have been going on since the 70’s (I wrote about Bell’s Theorem in E-Squared), there were still some nay-sayers pointing to loopholes. This new experiment, conducted by physicists at the Dutch university’s Kavli Institute of Nanoscience, ruled out all hidden variables and pretty much substantiates the weird quantum world formed from subatomic particles, a world where matter takes form ONLY after being observed and measured.
The Delft researchers entangled two electrons, separated them by nearly a mile and then measured the spin. They used diamonds with a tiny trap for the electrons and then placed them on opposite sides of the campus, ensuring that the information could not be exchanged by any other means. Well, guess what?
The electrons changed spins simultaneously. As Princeton physics professor John Wheeler famously said, “It’s one of the deep, happy mysteries that, at all times, we interact with and influence the world we observe.”
Why would we observe it any way except with big love and joyous gratitude?
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 Mirth, Magic and Merriment is your Full-time Gig.
“I never understand when people make a fuss over me as a writer. I’m just the garden hose that the water sprays through.” –Joyce Carol Oates
I’d like to interrupt this blog with a non-commercial announcement.
Yee-haw! (Yes, we say things like that in Kansas)
As many of you know, my new book just came out—8 days ago as of today—and already, it has gone into a second printing. That’s what I call awesome!
So thank you. But mostly, thank you for sending me all your amazing emails and manifestation stories. Today, for example, someone told me that Katharine Hepburn used to get up every day and say, “Lucky, lucky, lucky.” Who knew?
One of the many reasons I feel like the luckiest person on the planet is because every morning I get up to find real-time stories that confirm what I know to be true: that the universe loves us unconditionally and sends us exactly what we order through our beliefs and expectations. If we believe in blessings and miracles, that’s exactly what we get.
Here’s a fun story that came in early this week from a fabulous Emmy-nominated stunt driver and happiness blogger named Sarah-May Bates.
Take it away, Sarah-May:
“I just began my Boogie Woogie Corollary experiment and also redid a few of the E-squared ones along the way, and among other things I manifested two second row tickets to Evil Dead, the Musical.
Tickets are worth $160, but more that, it’s usually sold out. My fiancee Adam and I walked over to the Long Theater in Austin (I’m here on business) because we knew the show was in town and we wanted to buy tickets to the 10 pm show. Literally as I walked up to the ticket kiosk at around 4:45 and a man immediately walked up to us and said, “Do you guys want tickets? Here’s two – they’re in the second row.”
We stared at him in shock. We didn’t have any time to respond before he said, “I’m GIVING them to you. My friends chickened out. They’re in the splash zone! Enjoy!” And walked away. We thanked him profusely and immediately belted out, “Thanks universe!!” even snapping this photo so I could send it to you. (BTW, the splash-zone is where you get sprayed with fake blood and needless to say, I am a HUGE horror movie fan and Evil Dead 2 is in my top 5.)
The play was AWESOME and hilarious and I will treasure the experience for the rest of my life. We both toasted to you over a cocktail that night and I want to thank you for your writing and gifting of this amazing connection to the FP you have passed along to me. I keep getting gift after gift and blessing after blessing and I try to share this knowledge with anyone I who will listen!
Check out Sarah-May’s blog, “>Teaspoon of Happy, here:
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.
“Love should be ‘spread throughout the world, shouted in our ears for free.”—Stuart Kestenbaum
Thought I’d spread a little love from a reader who recently used the Einstein wands from E-Squared in a workshop at a Performing Arts Conservatory for Julliard and Broadway-bound youth. StevieAnne Petitt, a clinical hypnotherapist and life coach from Arizona, called them magic wards (actually a much better name) and used them to demonstrate the importance of being conscious of internal dialog.
In fact, she created a fabulous workshop called “Hang up your Negative Thinking,” a brilliant take since, after all, the wands are made from coat hangers.
Before she left the Conservatory, she and her students decided to conduct one last experiment, one that she called “super out there.” They asked the Universe to show them Big Foot within 48 hours.
Now, it’s one thing to find purple feathers and yellow butterflies, but Big Foot? People have been looking for the hairy ape-like creature for centuries. But StevieAnne shared on Facebook that on her plane ride back home, she found the elusive Sasquatch in her SkyMall magazine 30,000 feet in the air.
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.
“If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, he has not understood it.” Niels Bohr
I know it’s only Tuesday, but there’s reason to celebrate. One of the many things I’m celebrating today is Greg Kuhn’s new book which is out now. In honor of its riveting debut, here’s a guest post from THE MAN himself.
Do You Truly Know the Answer to: “Why Are You Here”? By Greg Kuhn
We now know what our universe really is: unbound energy. And I don’t mean to insult you with the title of this post because I’m quite sure you’re familiar with why you are here: to play the amazing fulfilling role of a contextual creator of your life experiences.
Continued acknowledgment is appropriate here of the fact that our role of creator can sound like a new age, feel-good, wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if-it-were true philosophy when weighed against a Neanderthal’s paradigms. It can sound, to the skeptic still trapped in the paradigms of her senses, something that all of us “new age, airy-fairy” types naively wish were true.
People who aren’t ready to take the next steps of human evolution can’t help themselves for reacting like this because this information runs counter to what their senses tell them. There is precious little indication from our senses indicating that we are contextually creating our material experiences; who can be blamed for thinking that the material world is “out there”, outside of us, existing independently of us, and merely awaiting out discovery?
But because we now know how our universe really “works”, and because we now know that the creation of the material world is not a bottom-up process, those Neanderthal perspectives have a limited shelf-life. Which is fortunate for Neanderthals, of course, because a bottom-up paradigm is pretty scary, as we all know. In fact, some of us could say that we are deliberate creators not because we want to get to paradise, but because we’ve been imprisoned by our misery and we don’t ever want to go back.
Although you have a pretty good idea of why you are here, it’s important to point out some important conceptual semantics in that question itself. These semantics are invaluable for a leading-edge creator like you. You need to always remember who “you” are. And the answer to who “you” are reveals why “you” are here.
But there is one more contextual semantic to iron out, because the term “here” must also be correctly defined in answering the question of why “you” are “here”.
“You” are not your body. Your body is finite, as far as we know; your body is a collapsed portion of the quantum field and, as such, is a time-space event. “You” are not your body; “you” are your consciousness. “Here”, however, is your physical body, a vehicle for “you” to experience human life.
In other words, “you” are “here”; your consciousness is inhabiting your physical body, which is the vessel allowing you this experience. Do you, like me, think this is probably the noetic wisdom inspiring the age-old concept of your body being your temple?
So the most complete answer to the question of why you are here involves remembering that “you” (your consciousness) are “here” (inhabiting your physical body to facilitate the experience of a human being alive on Earth). Every person on this planet is contextually creating, at all times, in every second, whether or not she knows it or believes it. Every person on this planet is collapsing the potential of the quantum field, in every single instant of her life, because that is what people do. You can’t stop collapsing the quantum field and contextually forming the material world if you try.
All “you” are doing “here”, in fact, is becoming more influential at something you’ve always done. So relax, you’re already an old hat at contextual creation; all “you” are doing “here”, right now, is becoming an All-Star in the game of “Grow a Greater You”.
“The world you see has no effects. It merely represents your thoughts.”—A Course in Miracles
I recently wrote a story for CNN on this summer’s bumper crop of new roller coasters.
The really insane ones, the ones with the 85-degree vertical drops and the seven inversions usually have a camera poised right where the coaster plummets 185 feet.
If you look at the photos these theme parks somehow manage to process and have waiting for you to purchase when you step, wobbly-kneed, off the ride, you’ll notice the teenagers usually have big smiles on their faces with their hands in the air. The adults? They usually look terrified, even though they know, theoretically, they’re perfectly safe.
Life is a lot like those roller coasters. It sometimes looks like we’re in danger, but, as my lesson today in A Course in Miracles reminds us, “The time has come to laugh at such insane ideas. Nothing external to your mind can hurt or injure you in any way. No one but yourself affects you.”
So let’s join the teenagers, put our hands in the air and shout with glee, even when the coaster car appears to be heading downhill.
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.
“If you could observe the physiological changes that take place in your body when you’re in negative states, you would stop immediately.”–Eckhart Tolle
I didn’t learn these three key facts in school. Nor from my parents. Nor from my culture. If I had, I could have saved myself an s-load of trouble.
1. If you want to change something in your life, your thoughts and consciousness are a far better tool than physical effort.
2. Life (or the Divine Buzz that animates everything) is always on your team, re-creating your thoughts and consciousness out here in physical form, making it easier for you to see.
3. We’re here on the physical plane to play around with this animating energy, to have fun, to experience joy.
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.
“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.
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.
“Most people are as happy as they make up their mind to be.”
–Abraham Lincoln
Last week, I was talking with Mastin Kipp. He’s the 31-year-old whiz kid behind the popular website, TheDailyLove (TDL). You might have seen him on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday as one of the spiritual leaders for the next generation. Although he now lives in L.A. and hobnobs with the likes of Tony Robbins and Kim Kardashian (she’s the one who helped get the ball rolling on his website, when she tweeted out to her 2 million followers, “You should follow this.”), he is originally from my hometown. His parents still live here, he came home for Thanksgiving right after the big Oprah wing-ding and so I decided to profile him for the local Lawrence Magazine.
My editor, who adores sidebars, said, “Ask him for some tips.” He gave me several, but the one I most resonated to was this: “The one thing we have control over is our thoughts, the meaning we give to events that happen in our lives. We can frame things in whatever light we choose and how we word the questions we ask ourselves is extremely important.”
For example:
“Is something the end….or is it a new beginning?”
“Is this a breakdown…or a breakthrough?”
As he says, “It’s a very powerful thing that we get to decide the meaning we give to things.”
So in honor of Mastin and my own evolving awareness, I’d like to share a couple reframed thoughts that have really blessed my life.
1. I am the Bill Gates of free time and flexibility. I’m a freelance writer so there’s no boss expecting me to clock in. I can travel whenever I want to. I can attend get-togethers in the middle of the day—like my spiritual entrepreneurs group—or lunch with a dear friend as I did yesterday for two and a half hours. Some people would panic without a regular job. I prefer to see it as having an abundance of time and a whole wagonload of opportunities to create new things.
2. I am OTT wealthy with an unlimited supply of creative capital. I have so many ideas I want to write about, so many books and TV series and articles I want to produce. And to my way of thinking, creative capital trumps the other kind of capital because mine is capable of producing the other kind of capital and is lots more fun.
3. I have fun no matter what. There’s no question that, as a travel writer, I get to do a lot of cool things—meet medicine men from the Cook Islands, hang with wealthy people at five-star resorts, eat every meal beside the ocean—but it doesn’t take that for me to have fun. My favorite recent example of this happened in December.
I was scheduled to go to Belize to bring in the “end of the Mayan calendar” at Caracol, a jungle Mayan city still being excavated. The night I was supposed to pack for my 6 a.m. flight, my back went out. I wasn’t able to go….at that time. So I lay in bed that first day in what some might describe as excruciating physical pain. I could barely get up to pee. But I, because of my commitment to fun and joy, actually had a stellar day. I was so happy–really!!! I decided to have fun anyway. I look back at that day as very important to my spiritual growth because I realized this:
Our thoughts are the only thing that separate us from having every single thing we could ever want.
Thank you, Mastin, for the reminder.
Pam Grout is the author of E-Squared: 9 Do-it-Yourself Energy Experiments that Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality.
