Part IV: Be Obedient

(fourth installment of talk entitled, "How being yourself guarantees infinite supply")

When you start opening thought to the Divine in that way [as discussed in Part III], strange things might start occurring to you. Like, maybe you should call that person you haven't talked to in twelve years. Or maybe you should go down to the magazine stand and leaf through some trade publications. Or maybe you should attend an event that has never been on yours schedule before. This step is about trusting these impulses and acting on them.

Let me take you back to that time right after my more recent layoff from the job I loved. I have to admit I was pretty shell-shocked for a month or so. There were some great breakthroughs spiritually, but also moments of deep darkness and depression. What I was especially grieving about was the idea that my voice had been silenced somehow, that I could no longer express all the ideas within me that were bursting to get out and be shared. I felt very cut off from communicating with the world.

I had been going to God in tears about these issues and finding no peace. Finally, after a night when I mercifully got some sleep, I woke up in the morning with this idea: "Start a Weblog."

I thought, What? Can I do that?

Weblogs were still on the new-ish side. They'd been around for a couple years, but I didn't know many people personally who kept one. I also had a weird inhibition about human approval, meaning, could I just do something on my own without someone here on earth telling me it was okay?

And I heard that idea again. "Start a Weblog. Today."

Alrighty then! So I did.

This was prayer in action for me. For the next three years, every day (with very few holidays), I posted what was on my mind about my spiritual journey. This was huge for me. Not only was I sharing my spiritual journey with the wide world, I was learning as I went. The blog started out small, with just a few timid entries where I was barely dipping my toes in the water. As my courage grew, though, I covered every issue that came up, and that was just about everything from sex to drugs to rock and roll.

Now, looking back, I can see that one of the most important but unsuspected aspects of the Weblog was the fact that I was writing every day. Through obedience to Divine Mind, I reconnected with myself as a writer. I hadn't written creatively for many years. I had devoted myself to a spiritual cause, which was right for that time. Now that I was on my own again, God was leading me to ways to find out my own passions and talents.

Angels

Let's go back to MBE's essay on angels. Here's the sentence before what I just read: "God gives you His spiritual ideas, and in turn, they give you daily supplies." (from "Angels")

Here's that equation again: God sends ideas, they lead to what you need. I might add, "if you follow them." The arrival of these ideas is not passive on our part. We need to greet them, welcome them, obey them, take action.

During those months mentioned above, I was also looking here and there for full-time employment. But the idea that came most strongly was to freelance as a writer/editor, possibly for Websites and other marketing applications. I began to turn myself in that direction to see what would happen. Again, this was sheer obedience, with no real overarching desire on my part how it would turn out. I was just trusting that the toothpaste would be there the next day when I needed it.

Tom gave a great example of this [in his talk] yesterday, when he talked about hearing the angel message to stop and turn around. He didn't just hear the message, though, he had to take action! We can hear the message all day long, but if we don't obey it, we don't get anywhere.

So one day, I got the idea to visit the local Congregational church. I'd never visited any church in my community besides my own, so this would be first. Also, it was the same time as my usual church service. The idea was not only to visit that church, but to do it that weekend. No delays. Okay, I'll go!

I went to the service, which was nice, and then also attended the coffee hour afterward. When mentioning to someone there that I'm a Christian Scientist, someone else overheard and came right over to me. He was also just visiting that day. He wanted to connect with me for a business reason due to my faith affiliation. In our conversation, he urged me to attend a trade show for local businesses that was happening that Wednesday.

Huh, I thought. So I went.

There, I met a man at a booth for a telephone service, who took my card and invited me to visit his business networking chapter the following Tuesday. This was my introduction to the referral marketing business group that jump-started my freelance work. While I didn't join his chapter, I did find one closer to my home and joined there. I subsequently never had to do any additional marketing, and my business grew.

Now, just bear in mind none of this would have happened if I hadn't been obedient to that first, out of the blue, idea to visit the local church. Or at least it wouldn’t have happened that way. It was so easy!

Somehow, while I might think of bank accounts or equity lines as finite, I can grasp the idea that ideas are infinite. How can there ever be a shortage of ideas? They fill all space, eternally. That being the case, there is no lack at all, how could there be? Ideas fill the need infinitely.

You have infinite supply because you have infinite ideas arriving moment-by-moment from the Divine. Look to this Source as your fount of blessing, and follow where it leads.

Supply = Idea

A very wise spiritual healer I once knew said this is something we need to demonstrate every day, ongoing. It's not something we figure out once then forget about it. Even if we have all the money in the world, there will still be the need to overcome lack in other areas—maybe time, maybe health, maybe love. Most of us are focused on money as the measure of supply, but I'm becoming convinced this is way off. It's not dollars at all.

So what have I learned? That all I need is ideas. All I need, have ever needed, will ever need is new inspiration from the Divine to direct my next step. That's it. One idea, even, to initiate one next step. For, I can only take one step at a time.

If I'm afraid, if I'm scrambling to make money, if I'm acting under the impression that I need to figure out what to do, I block this free flow of ideas from the Divine. Because it is a free flow. Ideas are pouring out to us constantly. They are the embodiment or articulation of what harmony looks like in our particular instance, and we have constant access to them.

So to me, demonstrating abundance is about demonstrating an openness to ideas and a willingness to be obedient. To not second-guess the ideas, but to follow them with expectation of good.

[We took a break then.]

Someone asked me during the break an interesting question. She wanted to know how to tell the difference between an idea and a dead-end, you know, some idea that's not from the Divine. I talked a little bit about how to me sometimes it the difference between feeling, Huh, that's an interesting idea, and Argh! That idea makes me anxious!

But then she said something the clarified what she meant. She was interested in working more with children, and the idea came to her, "Look into adoption." This made her freeze up! She thought instantly about what it would meant to adopt, how a child in her life would change everything, and how could she do that?

As she told me that story, I stopped her and pointed out (I hope gently), "The idea wasn't, 'Go adopt a child.' The idea was simply, 'Look into adoption.' You don't know where that will lead or whom you might meet. Just follow the idea without expecting what the end will be."

So another element of this is to follow the idea as presented, and not read into it so much that it gets burdened with anxiety and fear. And then, see where it takes you.

As my life opened up in obedience to all these new ideas that came from knowing God more, I was led directly to this concept of being yourself.

TOMORROW: Part V: Be Yourself

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Part III: Know God

(third installment of talk entitled, "How being yourself guarantees infinite supply")

Knowing God is the foundation to all that we demonstrate in our spiritual practice. Christian Science of course is predicated on an understanding of God as all good, all Love, filling all space. This is quite literal—it's not theoretical.

So, to get specific, what spiritual truth was I relying on with that toothpaste story? What do we know about God that makes infinite supply a rock solid reality, rather than just a pie-in-the-sky wish? And just to make it plain as day, what aspect of God is the opposite of the belief of lack, which we've now seen is a belief in death?

[They answered—Life.]

Exactly! God is Life. Period, end of sentence. God is Life. What does that mean? Have you ever just sat and contemplated God as Life?

Here's what it means to me. There is no life that is not God. As you sit there, alive, you sit there, in God, of God, through God, from God. There is no separation between your life and God, Life. Your life exists because God fills all space, with Life.

Let's just contemplate this for a minute or two. I'd like to share with you a prayer exercise that I do to get in close touch with the Divine. Some of the techniques are what I've picked up from various practices I've investigated, but the content in thought is from Christian Science.

Here's what I do. I get settled first physically. See if you can't make yourself as comfortable as possible in these chairs. The point is to have your body be as little of a distraction as possible. We're not coddling our body, we're silencing it. Mary Baker Eddy talks of "silencing the material senses" when in prayer, and I'm wanting us to try to do that quite literally here.

Ready? As good as it gets? Try this back in your rooms as well, in a comfy chair. Next, what I do is to pull into thought the spiritual concept that comes to me most strongly as opposite to whatever problem I'm trying to refute in prayer. If it's a relationship problem, I might think of Love. If it's about business ethics, I might think of Truth. For a while, I used what I called the God Grid: God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love. I created a large grid with these terms along two axes, and then contemplated the combination of the terms in a systematic way. (Read the other blog entry for more info.)

In this case, since we're all here about abundance, let's all embrace Life. What's happening in my thought then is the complete focus on the idea of Life, and Life alone. I might combine this idea with other attributes of God, such as infinite or incorporeal. I might draw on aspects of Life, such as growth, presence, activity, etc.

Some meditation practices will tell you to empty your thought. I'm doing just the opposite here. Yes, I'm emptying my thought of material existence, but I'm definitely not contemplating the void. I'm filling thought with Truth. The point is there is nothing in my thought except Life. I don't even use many verbs. It's all about focusing and contemplating Life itself and the implications of Life being infinite and entirely good. Like Life is a great green tree in front of you, filled with spiritual qualities and standing in the sunshine.

So let's try that for a minute or so, silently.

[A minute went by. We took a deep breath and came back to earth.]

So, what happened? [People shared some very cool insights they had.] This is what happens in prayer. We might start with a core idea, but inspiration will bring us a new idea, right there in thought.

Another thing: what happened when thought became filled with Life? There was no room for anything else, was there? With Life as the only reality in your thought, lack, death, anything contrary to Life is banished. When thought is aligned that way, there is no other reality than Life.

Did anyone notice how hard it was to banish everything from thought for an entire minute? It can feel really long, can't it? But it's just like any kind of training. You start small, and grow. I tell ya, it took me a bit to get to a minute. Then I upped it to three minutes, then five, and eventually when in the practice brought it to a half hour. It was very cool, and extremely effective. That's where most of the healings I participated in took place. I can now snap back into it when I need to, although none of us can do this too often.

This is the kind of prayer that launched my healing practice and put me on the path of Boston. It was the systematic, regular attempt to learn more about God by directly focusing thought on the synonyms and attributes to the exclusion of all else. Over time I built up a huge reservoir of prayer ideas that just kept coming and coming, all based on a growing understanding of God.

But, then what? Would there be any more to the story? To quote one of my favorite vice presidential candidates, you betcha! We're on to Step Two.

TOMORROW: Part IV: Be Obedient

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Part II: What are we fighting?

[second installment of talk entitled, "How being yourself guarantees infinite supply"]

We came here this weekend to talk about abundance. We're doing this of course because there's an issue that we all have to face every day when we make purchases, every month when we pay bills, every year when we pay taxes, long-term when we plan for our retirement or for our loved ones, and on and on. Every single human being on this planet faces this issue not just once in their lives, but throughout their lives. What are some words for it?

[People shouted out fear, money, lack, etc. Lack is what we then focused on.]

Now, here's a pop quiz from Mary Baker Eddy. What are the three words Mary Baker Eddy uses to summarize all the evil that we experience? I'll give you a hint: here's a passage from page 26 of Science and Health: "Divine Truth, Life, and Love gave Jesus authority over …" What? You got it, "…sin, sickness, and death." (26:14-16)

MBE uses the three major categories of sin, disease and death to summarize all that we strive to overcome in this mortal seeming.

So, where does lack fit into those three? Which one of these three is lack? Is lack sin, sickness, or death? Let me ask you this. What is the result of lack taken to its logical extreme? If you experience total lack, what happens?

[Someone said in effect, "You die."]

Exactly. To me, lack is a belief in death. To borrow a rhetorical device from Joe Biden, let me repeat that. Lack is a belief in death.

Lack is a fear that you won't have enough, that you'll run out of what you need, and that you won't survive. Taken to its logical extreme, that is annihilation, that is death.

But you know, funny thing is, we do survive. We continue to survive for a long time, even while we're afraid of lack. We continue to have a place to stay, friends who feed us, clothes to wear, even as we're shivering in our boots scared to death of what we think we're not going to have later. Doesn't this indicate that the law of abundance is at work even when we're not in tune with it completely? Has anyone in this room not survived lack? Here we are! We still survive!

To quote that deeply spiritual film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "I'm not dead yet." You're not dead yet, so lack hasn't caught up with you yet. And it never will, because God Himself prevents it.

The toothpaste story

[some may recognize this as an earlier blog entry.]

This reminds me of a time about fifteen years ago, before I went into the Christian Science practice full-time.

My kids were small, and we were living in Santa Monica, California. Great town. I had a terrific job that paid for our apartment, the nanny, the car, being able to travel home to see family, and get everything we needed. We had a nice life there for a while. Then, my firm had lay-offs.

That was a Thursday. On Friday, I found myself out of a job and at home for the first time in five years. The reality of the situation started to sink in first thing that Friday morning, and trembling, I got up to start the day. My one single biggest concern was money. How would we survive?

The prior several months, though, had been a time of spiritual awakening. All my free time, along with down times at work, had been oriented toward spiritual study and prayer. I'd gained many significant spiritual insights and had been transformed from one who prayed only in a crisis to one who prayed for the sheer joy of it. I felt closer to divine Love than I ever had before.

The spiritual insights were almost like a bank account, and I'd been making deposits every day. The great thing about a spiritual bank account is that even when you spend your spirituality, the account doesn't get any smaller. In fact, the more you use it, the larger it gets. By practicing what I was learning, my spiritual reservoir was actually growing.

So that morning, as I stood at my sink getting ready for the day, I thought about what I'd been learning. I relaxed slightly, and felt a growing sense of trust. And then the moment came that has truly stayed with me in all the lean times since then.

I looked at the toothpaste tube in my hand. It was nearly full. I thought, "Hey, at least I don't have to buy toothpaste for a while." I thought of the full gallon of milk in the fridge downstairs. I thought of the full tank of gas in my car. I thought of our closets full of clothes and all the furniture we had. I began to feel rich.

I thought, "I have everything I need *today*. Why am I doubting I'll have all I need tomorrow?"

This startling realization turned me around. My confidence that all would be well grew in that moment, and colored my decisions and actions thereafter.

Well, obviously, we did survive. One day at a time, our needs were met, both through my own earnings and through generous help from friends and family. I wound up in the Christian Science practice full time within a few months (another result of all that spiritual study), I started writing extensively for the Christian Science periodicals, and eventually I was offered the job at spirituality.com and relocated with the family to Boston. Those years of service led to this, a successful freelancing writing/editing business and increasing supply. I may have other issues I'm working through, and I do! But this one I think I learned a thing or two about, which I'll be sharing today.

Mary Baker Eddy tells us in her pithy little essay "Angels," which I'll talk more about later, "Never ask for tomorrow: it is enough that divine Love is an ever-present help; and if you wait, never doubting, you will have all you need every moment."

So what are the four steps we'll be covering?

1. Step one: know God
2. Step two: be obedient
3. Step three: be yourself
4. Step four: let it flow

TOMORROW: Part III: Know God

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Emergence Conference in Philly—Abundanza

Just back from the annual Emergence International conference, this year in Philadelphia. Such a weekend of love and support.

I was the keynote speaker, on the topic of Abundanza. My talk was titled, "How being yourself guarantees infinite supply." It was a perfect storm of their interest in abundance (which came up a year ago), my own life over the last year of increasing income, and the world situation. Such incredible timing.

The attendees asked me to share my comments after the fact as well, so I thought I'd blog them here in installments. Not sure how many entries there will be, but I'll index them all in a summary entry.

Here's the intro to the talk. More to come tomorrow!

How being yourself guarantees infinite supply

Thank you Tom, Kerry, Doug, Wes and Hugh for your talks yesterday. It's such a privilege to be here with such high power spiritual thinkers. Such dedication and experience! And what a wealth of ideas we've received so far. I'm really grateful to Emergence for inviting me.

I'll be talking about guaranteeing supply by being yourself. As a framework for this, first I want to tell you about my own last couple years.

• In 2005, I had a full-time job that I loved.
• I had been promoted to manager over a team of people with whom it was a genuine privilege to serve.
• We were on fire with a sense of mission and purpose, and we had growing evidence that in our own way, we were changing the world.
• Then, the bottom fell out.
• A shift in vision and emphasis at the top of the organization materially altered the nature of our project to the extent that many of my colleagues and myself didn't quite fit in with the new direction.
• I found myself laid off from not only the best job I'd ever had, but the highest paying one.
• I had a daughter just about to enter college, a teen-aged son still at home, a mortgage that depended on that monthly income, and no idea what to do next.

Fear about money was just one of the many emotional riptides I experienced for the next several months. But, starting with infantile prayer, childlike obedience and baby steps, over time my own path has become clearer and clearer. Now, after three years, I have a successful freelance business, many new skill sets, a wide network of business connections, I'm making more money than I ever have in my life, and for the first time, I'm pursuing my dreams.

I hope in my talk today I can share both how and why this happened, and what I learned about my relationship to God and how understanding both Him and myself is a guarantee of abundance.

First, I'll discuss and I hope dispel the particular form of God's supposed opposite that we've gathered to refute this weekend.

Second, I'll be taking you through the four steps I followed that have led to really bountiful supply in my own life. I didn't know these steps would work when I started down that path, but in looking back, I can see they added up to an extraordinary sense of abundance that is bringing demonstrable results. If we have time, I can then share some specific things you can do to orient your thought toward greater supply, and address the world situation a bit.

TOMORROW: Part II: What are we fighting?

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Love your body

I've been beating myself up for the last week and a half. And I mean in the physical sense, not the mental one.

You see, I'm always doing something. My mom told me the other day that even as a small child, I was always busy. I was always on to the next thing, wildly curious, making things happen.

Lately, though, most of my activity has been in the cerebral realm. I sit at my desk, typing away on the computer, connecting with friends, writing fiction, editing books on all subjects, keeping up with the news, watching movies. See a trend? While my mind has been all over the place, my body wasn't moving much.

I found that my body wasn't keeping up. I'd actually be stymied in my pursuits by feeling, what is that again? Tired! I'd reach a limit on how far I could walk, or how long I could endure carrying something. The only thing that seemed to be speeding up was the time that elapsed before I wanted to eat something.

Hence the beating up. I was already working once a week with a personal trainer on muscle strength, but was getting little to no further activity. So, I joined a gym to take group classes.

I tried stepping, spinning, Pilates, yoga, and something called Group Power. Later this week will be Group Groove, which sounds really fun.

At the end of this morning's yoga session, in the deep relaxation part, I had a startling epiphany. I love my body.

After a few days of shock at the increased activity, today I'm feeling energized again. I'm feeling up to speed. I'm feeling activated.

I think of my body as a tool, like this new laptop, or my cute little iPhone. All these tools allow me to activate what's going on with me mentally. I use the tools to get things done. My body is one of those tools. And if I have any affection at all for my computer or my phone, which I do, shouldn't I really be grateful for and love my body? After all, it's been with me for a while. It hardly ever breaks down. In fact, the only time it disappoints is when I neglect it.

Take a look at this passage from Science and Health: "You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness. You should banish all thoughts of disease and sin and of other beliefs included in matter" (208:29-1).

How does this connect with what I'm doing physically? Maybe it doesn't. MBE is clearly talking about a mental embrace. But maybe there's a cause and effect connection between what I think about my body and what I express physically.

What struck me this morning while relaxing in that class (when I was supposed to be emptying my mind, owell!) was that I personally have a very active mind. In order to be in alignment with my own expression of thought, my body can be expected to also be very active. Why shouldn't it? Is there any reason for my body to slow down when my mind shows no sign of letting up, even for a minute?

What this means to me is that I can not only appreciate my own mental capacities, but also embrace my body in that same concept. To embrace can mean to include. I can include my body in my definition of self as active, engaged, agile, flexible, enduring, versatile… You get the idea. My body is not some separate thing from my thought. It expresses my thought. So I can hold it to the same high standard.

So, I love my body. I just love the thing. It's my pal. At this point in my spiritual development, it allows me to get things done. So, I'm going to stop criticizing it and instead embrace it. I'm going to increase my affection for every breath, every muscle, and maybe even every wrinkle and fold. It's done well by me. I need to thank it more.

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Embrace the debate

Another debate tonight, which I'm looking forward to watching. But in another forum, a friend asked me about the concept of debating itself. He was concerned that there's so much emotionalism and propaganda swirling around, especially in video form, that the issues are being lost. What's the role of legitimate disagreement, and how can we express it?

To me, there is a place for persuasion. For speaking our minds and thereby trying to bring someone toward our point of view. For listening and sincerely trying to see both sides. For letting our voice be heard through direct commentary, not just through the vote itself. It's one of the reasons I blog.

And people need to be allowed to talk, even if they don't express things the way we would. Maybe their rhetoric is not as civilized as we'd like, or as polished, or as erudite. Does that mean they shouldn't speak? I don't think so. I want to be in a society where everyone can speak up and have the chance to be heard. Only in this way can we really know what we're made of.

Here's part of a message I sent back to my friend:

Every time we express an opinion, we're attempting to influence. I'm grateful that you've expressed your thoughts to me on the issues in our discussion, because it is influencing me to think differently about [some issues]. Your words had an impact, because they made me think.

So we influence by tapping into what Mary Baker Eddy said was the "most active human faculty"— reason. To me, what means the most about what you've said is the distinction between influencing with reason and fact as opposed to trying to influence with emotion, which can too easily slip into manipulation.

I have to admit that this election is so important to me that I may have been tempted down the emotional path. I think the Saturday Night Live acts are funny and relatively bipartisan [so I've shared them]. John Stewart and Stephen Colbert [whom I watch] are also unabashedly wanting the [current administration] out, although I'm sure they'll do their share of administration bashing [no matter who comes next].

The thing is, humans talk. We learn from each other. We dialog. And that dialog needs to continue, even if it's sometimes messy or tasteless or misguided. Even those things reveal something about collective thought.

I think elections are a great example of collective thought in play, focused on one [event] with many issues. Our human experience is the manifestation of our collective thought, and elections bring so much of it to the surface. It's disturbing and exhilarating at the same time. Because we're all mostly complacent all the rest of the time doesn't mean these disagreements haven't been simmering under the surface. Elections make us bring it all out in the open, and we get a bead on what the aggregate population really thinks.

So I'm comfortable with scrappy dialog in general because it reveals so much about mortal thought. Then, we can see better, as you say, how to specifically direct our prayers rather than living in a dreamland of a false impression of harmony that isn't genuine. There is a lot about this moral existence that needs to be fixed, and it takes all of us to do it. So, we need to talk. We need to influence each other, hopefully for good, as much as we can. We need to bring out the best in each other.

Thoughts? Keep talking!

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