I read this quote this morning, and due to its length I had to share it here:

“We can’t become anything we want to be. We come into this world with a specific, personal destiny. We have a job to do, a calling to enact, a self to become. We are who are from the cradle, and we’re stuck with it. Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it. If we are born to paint, it’s our job to become a painter. If we are born to raise and nurture children, it’s our job to become a mother. If we were born to overthrow the order of ignorance and injustice in the world, it’s our job to realize it and get down to business.”–Steven Pressfield

This quote might seem to contradict standard metaphysical principles, which would encourage the thinking that one COULD indeed be anything one desires, but it doesn’t. It is a reasonable statement of the nature of our limitless potential and the context in which that potential can be realized.

Introduction–The Law of Attraction

Each morning, I read from three books to align my thinking according to some specific goal I have for my personal growth each day. Currently those books are:

• Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This book explores how to more intentionally achieve the mental state of “optimal experience” and, thus, improve the quality of life experience by managing consciousness to ensure happiness.
• Law of Attraction, by Michael J. Losier. This short book provides a practical guide to the application of the Law of Attraction to manifest our desires intentionally in our lives.
• Real Magic, by Wayne W. Dyer. This book focuses on how to create miracles in every day life, starting with the recognition that we are spiritual beings having a human experience and using our spiritual nature to affect change in our human existence.

These three books provide different views of the same phenomena rooted in the truth that our life experiences and what we perceive to be the quality of them is exclusively controlled by our own minds. Events that happen in our lives have no intrinsic meaning. Rather, we attach meaning to events, and that process shapes not only our human experience but the basis upon which we make future decisions about intent and how we choose to expend our psychic energy.

All three of these books make the point that at every moment of every day–and, after all, we always only have the present moment in which to act and have experience–we make decisions (consciously or unconsciously) about what enters our consciousness and how what we give attention to will affect us. Our happiness throughout a lifetime–or at any particular moment–is exclusively dependent on these decisions and nothing else. We control our own lives in every conceivable aspect.

3 Steps in Intentional Exercise of Law of Attraction

The intentional exercise of the Law of Attraction can be broken down to the following three steps:

1. Identify your desire. One must clearly identify what they want, and that desire must be logical.
2. Give your desire focus and attention. Next, one must gives desires positive attention, energy, and focus.
3. Allow it. Simply put, one must believe fervently that the Law of Attraction is working for them to attract what has been identified, removing all doubt and other negative vibrations caused by other negative emotions.

What one allows into their awareness dramatically affects one’s ability to exercise these three steps successfully–especially the third. Emotions are an important indicator as to the degree with which we are succeeding in this effort. Negative emotions block the law from working for us, which positive emotions feed into the law to bring forth our intentions much faster.

The Elements of Enjoyment

Our emotional state is an important part of our realization of happiness. We must enjoy the moments in our lives in order to be happy, so properly defining what enjoyment actually means is critical. In exercising the second step of the Law of Attraction, a task list usually emerges where we give focus and energy to the steps involved in creating things in our lives. We must derive enjoyment in these tasks to continually feed both the management of our positive mental state as well as the Law itself. In Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, identifies the following 8 “Elements of Enjoyment” based on a worldwide psychological study he conducted regarding the nature of optimal experience:

1. We must choose tasks and goals we have a chance of completing–thus logical.
2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Give focus in the absence of negative emotions or experience.
3. The goal must be clear.
4. The task associated with the goal must provide feedback. This ensures that concentration can be maintained.
5. One acts with a deep but effortless involvement the removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of every day life.
6. One has a sense of control over their actions.
7. Concern for self disappears, yet reappears more strongly once the goal is achieved.
8. The sense of duration of time is altered. Hours pass like minutes, and minutes slow down to seem like hours.

A Convergence of Ideas

Wayne Dyer’s book follows up with a discussion of the 14 keys to a miracle mindset, which I will talk about more extensively in another post, but my point here is to highlight the convergence of the ideas from three different books coming from different perspectives to a single concept. That concept is the fact that our lives are executed in our own minds, and we have complete control over the nature of our life experience by exercising control over consciousness–what we pay attention to, what we intend, and what we allow to affect us negatively or positively.

Eliminating the Negative

Negative emotion and “psychic entropy” (as Flow describes it) is our biggest enemy, and much of this negativity is rooted in false beliefs about ourselves that introduce doubt, thus preventing the exercise in the third step of the Law of Attraction. Consistently redirecting our thoughts away from doubt and other negative emotion is a key component to consistently ensuring a high quality of life and achieving the things we want.

The following quote is a terrific one that highlights how the way you think of yourself affects your reality and your experience in it:

“Ramakrishna once said that if all you think of are your sins, then you are a sinner. And when I read that, I thought of my boyhood, going to confession on Saturdays, meditating on all the little sins that I had committed during the week. Now I think one should go and say, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.’ Identify your notion of yourself with the positive, rather than with the negative.”–Joseph Campbell

Think on the positive things about yourself and your life each day, and you will experience more of those things as a matter of law. Law of Attraction.

The following quote of the day struck me from my reading today:

“The pain that’s created by avoiding hard work is actually much worse than any pain created from the actual work itself. Because if you don’t begin to work on those ideas that God has blessed you with, they will become stagnant inside of you and eventually begin to eat away at you. You might seem OK on the outside, but inside you will be ill from not getting those ideas out of your heart and into the world. Stalling leads to sickness. But taking steps, even baby steps, always leads to success.”–Russell Simmons

About the Author

The above quote is from Russell Simmons’ book, Do You. Russell Simmons is an Afriican-American enterpreneur most noted for being the creator of Def Comedy Jam.

Following is a quote by one of my favorite sources, the great Albert Einstein:

“From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”–Albert Einstein

The Quote

I came across this great quote that really crystalizes the meaning of “suffering” as well as how we might interpret events in our lives in a manner that always results in our betterment:

“Do you want a sign that you’re asleep? Here it is: you’re suffering. Suffering is a sign that you’re out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there’s falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering.”–Anthony de Mello

The Author

Anthony de Mello was a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist known mostly for his books on spirituality. One of his most noted conferences, “Wake Up To Life,” is the only full length conference he permitted to be recorded. He died suddenly in 1987, after which many of his teachings were questioned by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) in 1998 as being distanced from the Christian faith and the teachings of the Catholic Church. Considering spirituality–and not religion–was the main point of his teachings, this is not a surprise. After all, if everyone took responsibility in full for their own spirituality, why would we need a church?

Somewhere on the web, I encountered this rather thought provoking list of rules for being a human being. Intriguing as they are, the author of this work is unknown:

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”
4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you may go to the next lesson.
5. Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all of this.

Here’s hoping I don’t execute rule #10!

This quote for today resonates with me, because it provides clues to the true natural of spirituality and the continual journey of spiritual awakening:

“The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one’s own ignorance concerning one’s self and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s self.”–Aldous Huxley

About the Author

Aldous Huxley was an English writer best known for writing novels, including Brave New World–a futuristic novel set in the year AD 2540 (530 years from now). He was widely regarding as an intellectual, humanist, and pacifist as well as a philosopher.

What this means for me today…

I am currently reading a book by Deepak Chopra called The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life. This morning, I read Secret #6, which is titled “Freedom Tames the Mind.” Without basically regurgitating the whole chapter here, the general point is that our growth along the path of our spiritual journey is many times constricted by our thoughts regarding the collection of choices we have already made in our lives–and the judgments we have placed on them. Because the results of those choices–whether considered good or bad by our judgment–actually contain elements of both when fully analyzed, we are bombarded with a plethora of conflicting lines of thought referred to as samkaras, the Sanskrit word for “to flow together.” These “grooves in the mind” makes future thoughts flow in the same direction. This prevents us from actually exercising “free will” in decision making or “living in the moment,” as is so important in spiritual growth. We are, in effect, imprisoned by our past in this way, the problems associated with conflicting lines of thought based on an inaccurate perception of past events are many.

The Connection

The connection my reading and this quote lies in the answer suggested at the end of the chapter. The goal of the solution is to free the mind from these past considerations, so one can exercise free will, live in the moment, and make a “choice as if making it for the first time.” One might say that this might lead to a person repeating past mistakes, which is the common irrational fear, but this is prevented by discovering the part of one’s self–the Inner Self–that resides inside each of us and always knows the right answer. The “samskaras” from our past sit in between our true selves and the real answer–and need to be cleared away, so we can be free. Thus spiritual awakening occurs as a function of self discovery–the realization that we already have the answers we seek. We just need to look in the right place. With the right intent, even decisions that might be considered “bad” are reworked by the Universe that responds to our intent and can make “lemons into lemonade.”

This quote of the day is all about my current mission for this year:

Every moment of our lives we are either growing or dying—and it’s largely a choice, not fate. Throughout its life cycle, every one of the body’s trillions of cells is driven to grow and improve its ability to use more of its innate yet untapped capacity. Research biologist Albert Szent-Gyoergyi, who was twice awarded the Nobel Prize, called this syntropy, which he defined as the ‘innate drive in living matter to perfect itself.’ It turns conventional thinking upside down…As living cells—or as people—there is no staying the same. If we aim for some middle ground or status quo, it’s an illusion—beneath the surface what’s actually happening is we’re dying, not growing. And the goal of a lifetime is continued growth, not adulthood. As Rene Dubos put it, ‘Genius is childhood recaptured.’ For this to happen, studies show that we must recapture—or prevent the loss of—such child-like traits as the ability to learn, to love, to laugh about small things, to leap, to wonder, and to explore. It’s time to rescue ourselves from our grown-up ways before it’s too late.–Robert Cooper, from The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership & Life

Jesus once said:

“At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ He called a child, whom he put among the, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’”–Matthew 18:1-5

We must always retain our childlike capacity for growth if we are to fulfill our potential.

The following quote struck me today as the obvious “quote of the day”:

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.”–George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and activist, who, ironically, believed in socialism. He founded the London School of Economics and Political Science and was a most revered figure in English and Irish culture for his philosophical ideas until his death in 1950 at the age of 94.