Living the Spiritual Principles of Abundance and Prosperity Volume (3)

LIVING THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES OF ABUNDANCE & PROSPERITY VOLUME (3)

JOHN-ROGER, D.S.S.
with PAUL KAYE D.S.S.





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LIVING THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES OF ABUNDANCE & PROSPERITY VOLUME (3)


Mandeville Press
Los Angeles, California

INTRO

THIS VOLUME OF LIVING THE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES OF ABUNDANCE AND PROSPERITY COMPLETES THE SET OF THREE.

WITH JOHN-ROGER'S TEACHINGS AND QUOTES AS THE INSPIRATION, THIS VOLUME IS FILLED WITH ENCOURAGEMENT AND SUPPORT FOR US TO LIVE A MORE ABUNDANT, SPIRIT-FILLED LIFE.

THE CHAPTERS CAN BE REFERRED TO REPEATEDLY AND CAN GIVE YOU A PROSPERITY BOOST WHEN YOU NEED IT. EACH SHORT CHAPTER CAN ALSO BE READ AS A DAILY OR WEEKLY MEDITATION.

AFTER YOU HAVE READ A CHAPTER, YOU MIGHT THEN REREAD THE J-R QUOTE THAT BEGAN IT. YOU MAY FIND THAT J-R’S WORDS GROW DEEPER AND RICHER AS YOU CONTEMPLATE AND SIT WITH THEM.

MAY THIS VOLUME SUPPORT YOU IN SEEING GOD AS YOUR PARTNER SO YOU MAY WALK MORE FREELY AND JOYFULLY THROUGH THIS LIFE.

PAUL KAYE


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CONTENTS

What to Trust? 1
Reconnecting to Your Natural Rhythm 5
The Power of Presence 9
Exercising Our Divinity 13
Grace Coming Our Way 17
No Complaint Whatsoever 21
The Many Blessings of Grace 25
The Process of Creation 29
When Grace Is Always Present 37
Taking in This Moment 39
“All I’ve Got Is Yours” 41
Crystal Clear Consciousness 45
Everything You Need Is Already Inside of You 49
Is There Anything Out There? 53
Open to Infinite Supply 57
The Only Prayer Necessary 61
The Freedom to Focus on the Spirit 65
Joy, Dynamically Moving Through Your Consciousness 69
The Glory in the Human Being 73
You Are a Portable Gift 77
Winning in Your Fantasy 81
Enduring to the End 85
The Power of Limits 89
No Tension, No Lack, No Pressure 95
I Wish You Grace 99
Afterword 101
Appendix: Sources for the Quotes 103


WHAT TO TRUST?

Historically, people have tended to trust in materiality for their success. Instead of trusting in the Lord for their success, they trust in money or riches. Therefore, they withhold their tithes so they can have a lot more they can trust.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

It seems that every day brings more news for me to be outraged, disappointed, and judgmental about. Of course, I can always not look at the news. However, I like to keep informed and keep my eyes open to what is going on around me and in the world.

My indignation primarily has been over the endemic greed, corruption, and dishonesty that surface in the newspapers and on the internet on a daily basis. I have given my reactions some thought, and while there is, of course, always a justification for them, I have concluded that their prime cause is my own emotional immaturity.

I have lived in somewhat of a bubble these past 35 years or so working for MSIA, and my naïve and idealistic view of the world has been shattered these past couple of years. I’ve asked myself why I think anything should be different. After all, it’s not as if dishonesty has just been invented. It doesn’t take but a moment’s thought for the more prominent examples in history to come to mind.

Socrates, for example, in 450 BC, directly questioned the values of the people of Athens. He was put to death for his trouble. Addressing the jury at his trial he said this:

I have neglected the things that concern most people—making money, managing an estate, gaining military or civic honors, or other positions of power, or joining political clubs and parties which have formed in our cities. So I shall go on saying in my usual way, ‘My very good friend, you are an Athenian and belong to a city that is the greatest and most famous in the world for its wisdom and strength. Are you not ashamed that you give your attention to acquiring as much money as possible, and similarly with reputation and honor, and give no attention or thought to truth and understanding and the soul?’”

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher, living in 60 AD, taught about putting up with society’s woes and not allowing them to disturb one’s inner state. He was put to death for his trouble. Seneca said this:

Is it surprising that the wicked should do wicked deeds, or unprecedented that your enemy should harm or your friend annoy you, that your son should fall into error or your servant misbehave?

And, also this:

The wise man can lose nothing. He has everything invested in himself.

Jesus Christ exposed the dominant priesthood of the time, the Pharisees, for their greed, corruption, and hypocrisy. He was put to death for his trouble.

Lao Tzu, living in 500 BC, was tired of the petty bureaucratic ways and the corruption of government. On leaving the city to go to the desert to die, he was persuaded by a gatekeeper to write down his teaching for posterity. Thankfully, he wasn’t put to death for his trouble.

Central to Lao Tzu’s brief but profound words is the sage, whose life is in perfect harmony with the way things are. Lao Tzu, in his book Tao Te Ching, said this:

Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

Reading all the above, I can’t help but feel how presumptuous I am to be offended by what is going on in the world these days, when clearly it’s business as usual. Surely it is far better, and healthier, for me to take John-Roger’s following words to heart:

There’s only one thing left to do with this whole process called life, and that’s just to have a good laugh about it! Because it’s hilarious to think that we have within us the absolute essence of perfection, and we’re messing around with it and getting sick, having problems, having despair, and worrying about things going on in life, and it’s all under a direction of something that’s going to handle it all anyway.

Don’t fall in love with politicians—they’re all a disappointment. They can’t help it; they just are.

Peggy Noonan

RECONNECTING TO YOUR NATURAL RHYTHM

True enthusiasm comes from participating with God’s energy. When you’re attuned to Spirit, this energy is unwavering. But unless you continually reconnect with the source, the spiritual energy within you will dissipate and eventually disappear.

Therefore, it’s essential to take time for yourself. Time alone, in silence, allows your true self to reawaken and reconnect with the Divine. Then Spirit can flow through your body, mind, and emotions, generating enthusiasm on which you can ride. In time, you’ll learn to reconnect with this energy as quickly as you take your next breath. Breathing in awareness and breathing out enthusiasm become as regular as your heartbeat.

As you make a habit of continually reconnecting to God’s energy, the Soul replaces the personality as the center of consciousness. The Soul will still use the body, mind, and emotions as the vehicles through which it functions in the world. But instead of being distracted by your personality, you will be living in the crystal clarity of the Soul.

From What’s It Like Being You? by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

I mentioned the importance of slowness in the first volume of Living the Spiritual Principles of Abundance and Prosperity, but I’ve since gotten away from the practice and returned to my habitually rushing ways.

Stress for me is a disconnection from myself, so staying connected has become a priority for my health as well as my spirit. So I have decided to return to going slowly.

I live a tremendously abundant and prosperous life, but the way I live it is akin to living in a lush, flower-filled countryside but only experiencing it by whizzing through it on a high-speed train.

I do actually find I get more done by moving slowly, and a special side benefit is that I find myself calling in the Light more frequently and having short, sacred-moment breaks, quite naturally.

Once when I had a particularly long day of service ahead of me, I decided I was going to put all my effort into deliberately working slowly. When I started on the first piano, I put all of my effort into “being slow.” I opened my toolbox very slowly. Instead of grabbing a handful of tools and thinking I was saving time, I took each tool out one at a time. I placed each tool neatly in position. When I began setting up the piano, I performed each process individually, trying deliberately to work slowly.

At first, your inner dialog is howling at you to get going and pick up the pace. You can feel the anxiety build and the emotions float to the surface. However, your ego quickly loses ground to the simplicity of doing one thing at a time and doing it slowly, on purpose. It has no place to build stress and work up internal chatter.

The paradox of slowness is that you will find you accomplish the task more quickly with less effort because you are not wasting energy.

From The Practicing Mind by Thomas M. Sterner

There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practiced in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.

Sogyal Rinpoche


It is useless to force the rhythms of life. If I live with the anxiety to go fast, I will not live well. My addiction to speed will make me sick. The art of living is about learning how to give time to each and every thing. If I have sacrificed my life to speed, then that is impossible.

Ultimately, slow means to take the time to reflect. It means to take the time to think. With calm, you arrive everywhere.

Carlo Petrini (founder of the Slow Food movement)

As you take each situation as it comes, one at a time, it’s very easy. As soon as you feel overwhelmed or reactive, relax, rest, and gently pull your energy field back in, strengthening it by being still. Maybe you maintain your inner stillness for a moment, or a day, or a month.

From The Rest of Your Life by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

Thank goodness the poet Edward Thomas was not too fixated on the timetable when his express train stopped unexpectedly one June afternoon at the country station of Adlestrop. The word he uses is “unwontedly,” which implies not just that the stop was unscheduled, but that it broke the crust of the ordinary, chugging, routine time and opened a portal into something different.

The sudden stop meant that Thomas was able to appreciate where he was, and where he never expected to be, rather than moved ever onwards on smooth rails to an ever-receding goal.

What he saw and heard was nothing special; an empty platform, a man clearing his throat, the ordinary flowers and trees and haycocks and one of the commonest birds of English summer.

But the minute Thomas spent at Adlestrop station left an indelible impression; it printed an essence of summer time in the English countryside on his visual and aural imagination. Above all that minute had depth—depth that transformed the sense of place and history.

Instead of the flat landscape you see through a train window passing at high speed, a succession of unrelated “views,” Thomas experienced the mysterious profundity of place. The place suddenly became part of him; he was planted within it, rather than being rushed through it; he became, as a perceiving being, the centre and the heart of it.

Harry Eyres writing in his column “The Slow Lane” in the Financial Times

ADLESTROP

Yes, I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas


THE POWER OF PRESENCE

We all fall and we always will, as long as we have a physical body. But so what?
How often you fall is not important; what matters is how fast you can pick
yourself up.

If you’re wise, you won’t struggle against what is established on this physical level. You’ll work within it as you seek to gain greater attunement with your Soul.

From What’s It Like Being You? by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

Recently, as my wife, Shelley, was recounting a visit from one of her friends, my shoulders went into a gradual slump. I know the family. We call them “The Incredibles” after the movie of the same name. The family playroom, accessed by sliding down a fireman’s pole from a hatch in the living room, is fully padded with a trampoline, a climbing wall, and anything you need to audition for Cirque de Soleil. In addition to parenting their three children, they hold down full-time jobs while winning awards for their stop-motion animation films and receiving funding for their next one.

They also find time to pole vault, and their latest fun thing to do is BMX (extreme riding on bicycles). When Shelley mentioned that they even make their own bikes, the thought of a weeks-long unrepaired toilet handle in our bathroom immediately came to mind. No longer able to bear the weight of my own inadequacy, I slumped further off the chair into the fetal position.

It could have been worse. In the previous week I had been contemplating the insidious nature of comparison. It’s a sure formula for moving from abundance into lack. I finally resolved that it was better to use myself as the measure of my abundance, rather than someone else. I can start with being grateful for all I have and, from that baseline of fullness, do a little bit to improve myself each day. Now to get to that toilet handle.

You can’t help but be who you are: that’s what breathes you.
Your problems come when you pretend to be someone else.

` John-Roger, D.S.S.

Judaism so treasures words one might think you could get a righteous person out of a book. Yet beginning with the Bible, Judaism taught that laws come to life in people. Role models speak louder than rules. Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, Solomon Schechter, famously explained that the purpose of coming to the seminary was not to learn a fact or law; that could be learned elsewhere. The purpose was to study with great men. Speaking of his years as a student, my father told me far less about what he learned than about the people with whom he learned. They were not perfect, but they were passionate, learned, marvelously eccentric, and they brought the tradition to life.

To the extent that the Internet and the proliferation of long-distance learning deprive us of being in the presence of charismatic, kind, scholarly people, it will be a tremendous loss. When a Hasid said that he traveled miles just to see how his master tied his shoes, he was expressing this beautiful idea. What we learn from a great teacher cannot be put into a book, because it is in a look, an inflection, a quirk of personality or a tossed off comment. The greatest human lessons are found in the power of presence.

Rabbi David Wolpe

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is widely regarded as the greatest novel written in English in the twentieth century. It retells Homer’s Odyssey in the context of a single day—June 16, 1904—in Dublin, Ireland, recasting Homer’s great hero Odysseus in the unlikely guise of Leopold Bloom, an aging, cuckolded ad salesman who spends the day running errands and making various business appointments before he returns home at long last.

Though Bloom seems unassuming and ordinary, he emerges as a heroic figure, displaying compassion, forgiveness, and generosity toward virtually everyone in the odd cast of characters he meets. In his mundane and often unnoticed deeds, he practices an everyday heroism that is perhaps the only heroism possible in the modern world. And despite the fact that he always feels like an outsider—he is a Jew in an overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland—Bloom remains optimistic and dismisses his insecurities.

Matt Blanchard in, The Intellectual Devotional

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.

Mark Twain

Postscript: A mere six months after this piece was written, the toilet handle was finally repaired—by my wife.


EXERCISING OUR DIVINITY

A big part of my work with people has been to demonstrate to them that they are divine—through stories, metaphors, the updating of the esoteric teachings of old, and above all personal experience. To show them that no matter what they do, the spark of divinity lies within them waiting to be awakened through their loving attention.

Many people “get it” and then they fall out of it again. Most people don’t get it at all because they use their bodies, mind, and emotions as a reference point and compare themselves to others. By judging themselves and others, they miss the whole point.

I have often wondered how they can miss what is immediately present within them, closer to them than their next breath. It may be because they feel that their divinity has to manifest as some radiant light, that they need to be able to heal people with a look, or somehow levitate. While it is true that spiritually we do radiate and are known through our level of Light, in this physical day-to-day world, our divinity mostly expresses through our ordinariness.

When we are knocked down by life’s storms and we get back up again, we are exercising our divinity. When we choose to love rather than judge, we are exercising our divinity. When we withhold the blow rather than needlessly strike out, we are exercising our divinity. Our divinity, therefore, is demonstrated in our ordinary moment-to-moment choices.

From The Rest of Your Life by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

I have been recalling J-R’s saying words to the effect that our time in this world is like being at Disneyland. On a separate occasion, I recall that he said that our time here is a vacation. What if what J-R said is accurate and that I am actually on vacation? I’ve been playing with that idea.

When I just say to myself, We’re on vacation right now, I get a visceral response. My body relaxes, and I get a smile on my face. For now, the effect lasts about 60 seconds, and then I get distracted by other, non-vacation, things. But, hey, a 60-second vacation is better than no vacation at all, and perhaps I’ll be able to expand the time with practice.

The movie Office Space is a comedy about a typical corporate-office, cubicle environment. The lead character is a very uptight Peter Gibbons who, in order to deal with his stress and upset, goes to see a therapist. The therapist has him close his eyes and counts him down from twenty into a deep, relaxed state. When “one” is reached, the therapist suddenly has a heart attack and dies on the spot. The next scene is the following morning, and you see Peter happy, relaxed, and strolling into the office in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. He was never counted up and thus remained in that state. I often think of that when I am getting a little too wound up.

(As to Disneyland, J-R admitted that at the end of spending a day there, it didn’t exactly feel like a vacation.)


This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Guest House

Conor was a Marine patrol leader, charged with searching houses in Fallujah and then Ramadi, arresting “suspected terrorists”, etc.

He had much to say about military misconduct and was troubled by this for some time. One day, he was ordered to search an entire block in Ramadi. On his orders, they went house to house, destroying furniture, breaking windows, terrorizing the entire population (he has many stories about that as well). They found absolutely nothing. They finally came to the last house. Surprising to him, when he opened the door, it entered a small courtyard, with a magnificent lawn, and beautiful flowers (this, in the middle of the desert). Well, he ordered his men into the house, told them to break everything, while he swept the courtyard for weapons. He didn’t find any, and took a shovel, and started to dig things up.

In a few minutes, a middle-aged man, wearing a dishdasha, came out of the house that was being wrecked, with a tray, and served them and the rest of the men tea. In perfect English, he asked Conor about his life, where he was from, whether he had any siblings, what he really liked to do, how Iraq was treating him. Not even a hint of bitterness or anger in his voice.

That was the day Conor Curran decided to leave the military.

David Albert


GRACE COMING OUR WAY

For our time, tithing goes back to the time of Abraham when he gave to the high priest, Melchizedek.

But when Jesus came in and incarnated, the old law of tithing was superseded by a new process under the Christ.

So we take the old law and move it around to realign it with the new energy flow. When you tithe to MSIA, you tithe in that new energy flow under the Christ.

That means when you tithe out of your goodness and gratitude, there is going to be a lot of grace coming your way.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

One of the first obstacles facing many Jewish people coming into MSIA is the mention of the word Christ. Although I was raised an orthodox Jew, it was not an obstacle I needed to face. Finding that I was learning nothing at a modern school, my parents sent me at the age of seven to Holy Trinity, a Church of England school, where I was immersed in the English version of Christianity. While my peers at Hebrew School cringed at the mention of Jesus or Christ, the names were a perfectly natural and daily occurrence for me.

Jesus is Greek for Yeshua, apparently a fairly common name in Jesus’ time. Christ is the Greek word for messiah, which means anointed one. Jesus was a Jew, in fact a rabbi, who taught the Old Testament and then transcended it, showing us a new doorway into higher consciousness which we could enter through his example of forgiveness and loving. Thus, to me, it’s a tremendously sacred and profound act that in MSIA we get to tithe and seed into that Christ line of energy.

In answering questions on the subject of abundance, I have often said that tithing and seeding are not necessarily about what we get but are often about what we don’t get. The latter has been my pathway to grace, with a lot of added blessings along the way.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

William James (American psychologist and philosopher, 1842-1910)

The fragrance always remains on the hand that gives the rose.

Mahatma Gandhi

Melchizedek was a high priest during the time of Abraham, who established the priesthood of unconditional loving. MSIA ministers are ordained into the Melchizedek line of energy. Melchizedek also introduced the concept of tithing as an expression of recognition that all things come from God.

John-Roger


Here are three recent sharings I have personally received from readers on tithing:

Thank you for yet another wonderful “God Is My Partner” email newsletter. I’ll be returning to tithing, partially because of a thought that hit me this morning. Part of what tithing clears is an impression of lack, or perception of lack. Once the impression of lack is gone, lack is actually gone! The only lack there is, is that which we think is lack. I can’t begin to tell you how much plenty my husband and I have—it’s amazing!
L.M.

I have been tithing regularly for about a year and half now. Prior to that I would tithe when I felt like I had enough money, which wasn’t often. There was a turning point in my consciousness that got me to tithe regularly. I was struggling trying to pay bills and at one point I needed money just to buy groceries. God brought me the money I needed and I knew that I had to start tithing at that moment because it was truly a gift from God and who am I to cheat God when God is so good to me? At that point I started giving 10% to MSIA and 10% to the God in me. My life has totally changed because of it. I feel a great peace inside of me and have pretty much stopped wondering how I will pay for something. Now I am working on expanding my consciousness, more, so that I’m not just getting by, but doing things that make living on the planet so wonderful.
M.M.

I was talking with my friend and sharing with him about my challenge with tithing from an authentic and joyful place. My friend asked me if God were to come into my home and ask me to sacrifice my life for him, would I? My answer was immediate and clear, “Yes!”

It suddenly became obvious to me that I could tithe from a place of sacrificing for the Lord and easily give 10%. In truth, I could give it all from this place of my loving for God. In the past, I had identified with lack, and I never could give in a joyful way because I had never experienced financial overflow.

I live a life of dedicated service, and I have told myself that this was how I loved God and that it was enough. However, I would read a sharing about tithing and not really “get it.”

I can reflect back at times when I have sacrificed my hurt, upset, and other mental and emotional attachments and found freedom and love on the other side. This morning I went online and for the first time tithed 10% from a place of sacrifice and love for the Lord. Wow, it was a very different experience. As I learn to live within my means and sacrifice 10% of my earnings, I am now open to abundance beyond measure.
L.K.


NO COMPLAINT WHATSOEVER

How do you know your tithing works? By the results that it’s bearing. And what if it doesn’t bear the results? You didn’t do it out of your heart. God says that He loves a joyful giver. You forgot to smile as you wrote the check. You forgot to say, “Thank you, Lord, and there’s more coming. And thanks for the health and thanks for this and this and this.”

The thankfulness is like a litany, almost like chanting the spiritual exercise mantra. It will start to produce changes in us that are remarkable. And often it also produces changes in other people around us that are equally as remarkable, because with those we love and care for, we share the goodness and the bounty of our spirit.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

A hundred and fifty years ago there lived a woman named Sono, whose devotion and purity of heart were respected far and wide. One day a fellow Buddhist, having made a long trip to see her, asked, “What can I do to put my heart at rest?” She said, “Every morning and every evening, and whenever anything happens to you, keep on saying, “Thanks for everything. I have no complaint whatsoever.”

The man did as he was instructed, for a whole year, but his heart was still not at peace. He returned to Sono, crestfallen. “I’ve said your prayer over and over, and yet nothing in my life has changed; I’m still the same selfish person as before. What should I do now?”

Sono immediately said, “Thanks for everything. I have no complaint whatsoever.” On hearing these words, the man was able to open his spiritual eye, and returned home with great joy.

Adapted by Stephen Mitchell from A Flower Does Not Talk
by Zenkei Shibayama Roshi

The following quote is from Timeless Wisdoms, Volume One, by John-Roger. Please read it and keep it close by you. There are so many keys here to living the spiritual principles of abundance and prosperity. Every time you read or hear anything negative about the economy or environment, instead of being caught up in what is being said, perhaps you can read this quote.

Ultimately, you can’t do anything “wrong,” because God is with you, in you as you, and is making sure that it all comes out perfectly. And that is a lot to be thankful for.

An attitude of gratitude is also a key to being in harmony with infinite supply. When you can honestly and truly thank God for what you have, for all your experiences, for all the people in your life, and for all your expressions, the sense of gratitude goes very deep. In that depth, you are open to infinite supply.

You also might think about being grateful when your desires are not being fulfilled. You might think about being grateful when your prayers are not being answered. Let those desires and prayers go, and ask only for the highest good, that you might be free of the creation of desire, that you might be free from illusion, that you might be free to know your own Soul and its perfection and glory.

Sometimes the best way to make the most out of a situation is to get out of it. The other way is to accept it and be grateful that it isn’t worse. I find that it’s much easier to just love it all. When it shows up, I go, “Wow. Another form of loving. Another face of loving. Another expression of loving. Another location of loving.” And then I get to participate in it. That’s grateful.

As you accept what you have and give thanks for your blessings, you find your life becoming happier and happier. Because, truly, my friends, you are blessed. There is not one of you who is not continually receiving of God’s infinite blessings and grace.

A. J. Jacobs followed all the commandments in the Bible for a year (including tossing a pebble at an adulterer to fulfill his obligation to stone them) and wrote about them in his book A Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. Although, ironically, one of his conclusions was that he did not recommend this to anyone, he did make the following comment that is pertinent for this chapter:

Another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks, and this one is a big lesson because I was giving these prayers of thanksgiving which was odd for an agnostic like me. But I was saying thanks all the time every day, and it started to change my perspective. I started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day that I didn’t even notice, that I took for granted, as opposed to my focusing on the 3 or 4 that went wrong. So this is actually a key for happiness for me.

There may be a positive byproduct of our troubled times: a decrease in the urge to complain. People who still have jobs are finding reasons to be appreciative. (It feels unseemly to complain about not getting a raise when your neighbor is unemployed.) Homeowners are unhappy that home values have fallen, but it’s a relief to avoid foreclosure.

There is also a growing “noncomplaining” movement that touts the belief that whining doesn’t work as a strategy. A Complaint Free World Inc., has distributed almost six million purple bracelets that when wearers find themselves complaining, they’re asked to switch bracelets to their other wrists. The goal is to go 21 days without having to switch.

Rev. Will Bowen believes the economy may be the antidote we need to re-evaluate our lives. “In good times, people often take for granted what they have, and whine about what they don’t have,” he says. “These times make people more grateful.”

Jon Gordon, author of The No Complaining Rule, has collected research showing that gratitude reduces stress and improves health. Every morning, he takes a gratitude walk and thinks positive thoughts in order to “change a complaining voice to an appreciative heart.”

It’s easy for the experts to rhapsodize about gratitude. But there are merits to tempering your complaints. Dr. Sherene McHenry encourages us to write down three things we’re grateful for every day—no matter how simple they might seem. “Some days,” she says, “the list might be as basic as oxygen, food and shelter.”

Jeffrey Zaslow

THE MANY BLESSINGS OF GRACE

Grace comes to you from God, through seeding, in so many ways—most of which you won’t even be consciously aware of.

For example, your seed may prevent negative things from coming into you that you don’t know about, which then allows the things that you want to come forward.

God always supplies my seeding—always—not necessarily the way I wanted it,
because it may not be real good for me to have what I have seeded for.

Sometimes it’s not what you get that’s the blessing—it’s what you don’t get.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

I once received an email asking me what the principles of abundance and prosperity were. I didn’t have an immediate answer, because they had never been codified, and I had to think deeply about the question. What I came up with was that the key principles were giving and gratitude—we give joyfully, gratefully, and unconditionally.

Since then I have thought about it a little more, and I would now say that the most important principles of abundance and prosperity are that there is an endless supply that comes from God and we can be part of that energy of abundance and fullness by turning our attention to the Divine. I would also add that faith is part of the process.

Seeding is a faith process. As J-R says, “When you seed, you need to do it with the real faith of the heart. You have to claim what you seed for, but you have to claim it in God’s time and love.” And “The faith is claiming that you will receive prior to it coming to you. Faith is also basking in gratefulness for the grace of Divinity showered on you because you have seeded. And you did it joyfully.”

I’ve never been big on faith, it wasn’t part of my culture growing up, but it has become more meaningful to me over time. Perhaps trust is another principle of abundance and prosperity. Trusting in the Divine. I once updated my Facebook profile under “Political Views” to saying, “Thoroughly disillusioned—but isn’t that the point?” It was a joke, but it actually made me feel more grateful and freer. I now know for sure where to direct my trust and faith.

You can deal with mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas deal with crows. The crows often attack them, diving at the eagles from above. But, instead of doing all kinds of acrobatics, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, lets the diving crow pass, and then extends its wing again. The whole thing requires minimal effort and causes little disturbance.

Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way.

Matthieu Ricard

In the midst of radical transformations, the Self remains stable. The nature of the world, however, is in flux.
Mitra Somerville


Finally, here is an email exchange I had with a friend in Latin America:

NOVEMBER 18:

PK: How are you coping these days? Is the situation getting better or worse?

FG: Things are difficult and they expect them to get worse next year. I’m doing good, and grateful with all I have. Send the light to my son. He’s been without a job for 10 months.

PK: These are difficult times for sure, but there is always an opening, always grace.

NOVEMBER 23:

FG: I just want to tell you that as soon as I got your e-mail reminding me that through Grace we can receive what we need, I felt so confident that God would bring a job for my son. That afternoon he called to tell me he got a job. It’s a good job and he is very happy about it.


THE PROCESS OF CREATION

This process of creation doesn’t care what we go toward. If you get negative doubts and thoughts, the process will manifest those for you. So in undertaking seeding, you must understand that it’s a real tightrope balance in terms of what you’re going to keep holding in your mind. If you start getting negative pictures or thoughts about something you’re seeding for, stop them immediately. You want to make sure you’ve got this thing going in the right direction all the time, and you have to watch your thoughts carefully.

Knowing how you’re going to get there is not as critical as knowing that you’re going to get there and, in that, not having any doubts, any second thoughts—nothing except the holding and the acting as though it is going to happen.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

The New Year is always a good time to start looking for what we want to manifest—our goals, intentions, wants—for the highest good, in the coming year. This chapter is a little longer and denser to give you plenty to chew on to assist you in clarifying what you want for yourself—at any time of the year.

What distinguishes people with high levels of personal mastery is they have developed a higher level of rapport between their normal awareness and their subconscious. What most of us take for granted and exploit haphazardly, they approach as a discipline. Whether it is through contemplative prayer or other methods of simply “quieting” the conscious mind, regular meditative practice can be extremely helpful in working more productively with the subconscious mind. The subconscious appears to have no particular volition. It neither generates its own objectives nor determines its own focus. It is highly subject to direction and conditioning—what we pay attention to takes on special significance to the subconscious.

For most of us, as soon as we think of some important personal goal, almost immediately we think of all the reasons why it will be hard to achieve—the challenges we will face and the obstacles we will have to overcome. While this is very helpful for thinking through alternative strategies for achieving our goals, it is also a sign of lack of discipline when thoughts about “the process” of achieving our vision continually crowd out our focus on the outcomes we seek. We must work at learning how to separate what we truly want, from what we think we need to do in order to achieve it.

First imagine that the goal is fully realized. Then ask yourself the question, “If I actually had this, what would it get me?” What people often discover is that the answer to that question reveals deeper desires lying behind the goal. The goal is actually an interim step they assume is necessary to reach a more important result. The reason that this skill is so important is precisely because of the responsiveness of the subconscious to a clear focus. When we are unclear between interim goals and more intrinsic goals, the subconscious has no way of prioritizing and focusing.

Making clear choices is also important. Only after choice are the capabilities of the subconscious brought fully into play. In fact, making choices and focusing on the results that are really important to us may be one of the highest leverage uses of our normal awareness.

From The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

It’s a matter of loving yourself enough to clarify and clear the channel so that your success can manifest in reality, in this lifetime, for you to have, enjoy, and share.

From Wealth & Higher Consciousness by John-Roger, D.S.S.

So what do we do when we are seeding and the doubts come up and we can’t seem to stop them? What is the solution? J-R gives us the answer in his typical loving, direct way:

The solution is to grow up, learn to be mature, and handle it responsibly. There’s no way to do this except to really do it.

From Barry Goldman, writing in The Los Angeles Times:

Our “enoughness” switch is broken. Rich people have never had a sense of enoughness. A visit to any palace or castle anywhere in the world tells the same story. “Should I build another room full of gold spittoons and gem-encrusted chamber pots, or should I dig a well in the village for the people who don’t have any water? What’s the question?”

But the failure of enoughness isn’t just a problem for rich people. Look around your own house. Look in your closets. Closets in a modern house are dramatically larger than they were 50 years ago. But they’re still not big enough to hold all of our stuff. We had to invent the personal storage business so we could rent space to hold the stuff that won’t fit in our houses. And we keep buying more.

Our species never developed a sense of enoughness because the problem of too much stuff didn’t used to exist. In the ancestral environment, stuff was scarce. You never knew when you’d have another opportunity to get some. It was an adaptive strategy, for example, to eat as much as you could whenever you got a chance. People who took advantage of those opportunities carried around a little extra fat and were better able to survive when lean times came, as they inevitably did.

In the developed world today, for the first time in human history, scarcity is not a problem for most of us. But the tendency to grab stuff persists.

And waiting for a sense of enoughness to evolve is likely to be a long wait.

Perhaps the time has come for us to assert some control over our desire to acquire ever more stuff.

The Hadza have no crops, no livestock, no permanent shelters. They are living a hunter-gatherer existence, in today’s Tanzania, that is little changed from 10,000 years ago. They do not engage in warfare. They’ve never lived densely enough to be seriously threatened by an infectious outbreak. They have no known history of famine; rather, there is evidence of people from a farming group coming to live with them during a time of crop failure. The Hadza diet remains even today more stable and varied than that of most of the world’s citizens. They enjoy an extraordinary amount of leisure time. And over all these thousands of years, they’ve left hardly more than a footprint on the land. They live almost entirely free of possessions. The things they own—a cooking pot, a water container, an ax—can be wrapped in a blanket and carried over a shoulder.

No Hadza adult has authority over any other. None has more wealth; or, rather, they all have no wealth. There are few social obligations—no birthdays, no religious holidays, no anniversaries. People sleep whenever they want. There are no wedding ceremonies. Gender roles are distinct, but for women there is none of the forced subservience knit into many other cultures. The chief reason the Hadza have been able to maintain their lifestyle so long is that their homeland has never been an inviting place. The soil is briny; fresh water is scarce; the bugs can be intolerable.

The Hadza are not big on ritual. There is not much room in their lives, it seems, for mysticism, for spirits, for pondering the unknown. There is no special belief in an afterlife—every Hadza I spoke with said he had no idea what might happen after he died. There are no Hadza priests or shamans or medicine men. No Hadza I met seemed prone to worry. It was a mind-set that astounded me, for they, to my way of thinking, have very legitimate worries. Will I eat tomorrow? Will something eat me tomorrow? Yet they live a remarkably present-tense existence. This may be one reason why farming has never appealed to the Hadza—growing crops requires planning; seeds are sown now for plants that won’t be edible in months. Domestic animals must be fed and protected long before they’re ready to butcher. To a Hadza, this makes no sense. Why grow food or rear animals when it’s being done for you, naturally, in the bush?

The Hadza are not sentimental. They don’t do extended goodbyes. Even when one of their own dies, there is not a lot of fuss. They dig a hole and place the body inside. A generation ago they didn’t even do that—they simply left a body out on the ground to be eaten by hyenas. There is still no Hadza grave marker. There is no funeral. There’s no service at all, of any sort. This could be a person they had lived with their entire life. Yet they just toss a few dry twigs on top of the grave. And they walk away.

There are things I envy about the Hadza—mostly, how free they appear to be. Free from possessions. Free of most social duties. Free from religious strictures. Free of many family responsibilities. Free from schedules, jobs, bosses, bills, traffic, taxes, laws, news, and money. Free from worry. Free to burp and fart without apology, to grab food and smoke and run shirtless through the thorns. But I could never live like the Hadza. Their entire life, it appears to me, is one insanely committed camping trip. It’s incredibly risky. Women give birth in the bush, squatting. They have to cope with extreme heat and frequent thirst and swarming tsetse flies and malaria-laced mosquitoes.

The days I spent with the Hadza altered my perception of the world. They instilled in me something I call the “Hadza Effect”—they made me feel calmer, more attuned to the moment, more self-sufficient, a little braver, and in less of a constant rush. My time with the Hadza made me happier. It made me wish there was some way to prolong the reign of the hunter-gatherers, though I know it’s almost certainly too late.

From “The Hadza” (National Geographic, December 2009) by Michael Finkel

[The iPAD2] taps into our apparently insatiable hunger for instant gratification and desire to be one with our favorite gadgets.

“We are in an environment where there is no downtime anymore,” said Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We have become impatient.”

Three seconds may not be much, but it suggests to us that we may be able to send one more message or read one more tweet, he said. “Where does it end?”

The marriage of speed and technology did not start yesterday and it will not end tomorrow. When AT&T unveiled the first commercial push button phone in 1963, part of its pitch was simple: calling someone would be faster than it was on rotary phones. For years, makers of computers and Web browsers have competed on the speed of their products.

More recently, computer makers have been hard at work trying to cut the boot-up time of PCs—minutes of idle time that have become increasingly infuriating. Most hand-held devices turn on much faster. And with its smart cover, the new iPad 2 goes one step further.

“This is the story of our lives,” said James Gleick, the author of “Faster,” “The Information” and other books on the cultural ramifications of technology. “These little technologies that save us a fraction of a second or a gesture, they’re a form of crack.”

Paul Saffo, a veteran technology forecaster in Silicon Valley, likened it to another vital need. “Connectivity has become like oxygen,” he said. “If you don’t have it, you notice its absence at about two seconds.”

Miguel Helft writing in The New York Times

WHEN GRACE IS ALWAYS PRESENT

You enter into grace by loving God. Once you start to love God, grace is always
present. Living in grace is not hard. If it’s starting to be hard, you’re under the law. Giving up the struggle of going for grace might be the very thing that releases you to experience it.

Grace isn’t something that you go for as much as it’s something you allow. However, you may not know grace is present, because you have conditioned the way you want it to come, for example, like thunder or lightning, with all the drama, rumbling, and pretense of that. In fact, grace comes in very naturally, like breathing.

When you receive grace it becomes an attitude, a way of being, that you maintain. One way to do this is to hold a picture in your mind that you want more of, one that uplifts you. Once the attitude is formed, it is then practiced as a conscious behavior. The body then takes over and incorporates it as a habit.

You then start to walk through life not even knowing that you’re grace-filled and joyful until people notice and bring it to your attention. You’re joyful because you are not preoccupied with the things that used to bother you. They’re still there but they don’t bother you because you don’t focus on them.

From The Rest of Your Life by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

The profound experience of being at the Living in Grace retreat sets me up for the rest of the year. My personal theme is usually around learning to be more relaxed, and I am always reminded that the key is in the choice I make as to where I place my energy.

May your life be filled with grace.

Rabbi Bunam said to his followers:

Our great transgression is not that we commit sins—temptation is strong and our strength is slight! No, our transgression is that at every instant we can turn to God—and we do not turn!
18th Century Hasidic Text

The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed.
James Thurber

Give up to grace. The ocean takes care of each wave till it gets to shore.

Jalal al-Din Rumi

TAKING IN THIS MOMENT

I’ve used the following quote in the previous volumes of this series, and its implications have deepened for me over time because it goes to the heart of abundance and prosperity.

If I could really get you to understand that you are the source individually of all things around you, you would have the knowledge necessary for your life to come abundantly to you.

When you go out there in the world to “ get” things, you are operating from lack. You are saying, “I don’t have this within me, so I have to find someone to give it to me.”

If you could know that you are the source, you would not operate from lack. You would be manifesting your natural abundance, and the presence of Spirit would be with you.

From Timeless Wisdoms, Volume One, by John-Roger, D.S.S.

The time between Christmas and New Year’s Day tends to be a quieter one, an ideal time to take a couple of vacation days, a “staycation,” to catch up with what needs to be done at home. I usually do a lot of puttering around, washing dishes, cooking, playing with our cat, re-stocking things. When this little vacation is over, I usually find that very little or nothing has been accomplished.

Once, while further puttering around (cleaning out a plastic almond-milk pourer in order to re-fill it), it occurred to me that I actually loved doing these mundane tasks and was quite content. After all, at a deeper level, what I really want is to maintain a spiritual focus, be as loving as I can, and go about it all in a relaxed way—all of which are possible no matter what I am doing. It turns out that living my dream is available to me at any time.

Since what I want is present, the real task before me is to fully enjoy having it.

It’s natural to look for the things you want outside of where you are now. That is the whole point of a journey. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in a now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they appear and endure they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life. The marvelous, the lovely, will have to be right here in the room where someone is reading, someone is sick, someone is coughing, two people are making love, or a man is yelling at a dog. It will have to appear in the sound of rain splashing off trees, of a truck laboring up a grade, of TV from another room. It will have to appear in the sight of a child running, in the feeling of a headache, in the anxiety of preparing for exams, in worrying over a sick child, it will have to appear in what is ordinary, usual, commonplace, and right under your nose.

From Bring Me the Rhinoceros by John Tarrant

DON JUAN: To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of the candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.

Carlos Castaneda

There is no need for comparison or envy when we encounter someone who thinks they’re so wonderful and great, because we can all smile in the knowledge that they are going to be part of the ordinariness before too long. The Beloved eventually reduces us all to ordinariness, because ordinariness is the prior condition to God.

From The Rest of Your Life by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

“ALL I’VE GOT IS YOURS”

What we have to do is exercise this thing called God’s abundance.

When God manifests, he manifests abundance. That’s how we know it’s from God—it’s abundance. Otherwise, we’re pulling it to us out of the law of ourselves.

Yet, once we’ve done it out of ourselves, we haven’t really accomplished anything because we’re not manifesting the growth into God’s abundance. So when success comes our way, we often fail because we never learned how to grow into God’s abundance that is coming towards us. We manifest failure and lack, instead of saying, “God is bringing this into me and I have to grow big enough to get it—I’ve got to be able to put myself there to receive of it.”

Yes, it is a manifestation of faith, I agree. But it’s not the type of faith that’s a hope. Nor is it wishy-washy. It’s the type of faith of knowing it’s coming even though it’s unseen at this moment. You know it’s coming.

From the CD Manifesting God’s Abundance by John-Roger, D.S.S.

I used to think of seeding as a wonderful way to get things and to get what I wanted. I approach it differently now. It has become a way for me to get clear on my direction and, in that clarity, align with God’s energy.

Looking back, I can see that although I thought I was clear about a lot of things I was seeding for, in actuality I wasn’t clear at all, as there was a lot of wavering about what I really wanted.

Follow along below and you’ll see that the simple process of seeding is your very own personal abundance workshop. First, though, have in mind something you want to seed for.

Following J-R’s words in God Is Your Partner, here we go.

J-R: Check your inner levels to make sure there is no doubt or second-guessing
yourself. This is very important because seeding can work as powerfully to reinforce your doubts as it can to validate your faith.

Right there is the call for clarity, and J-R takes it further:

You get your purpose clear, and if you get at cross-purposes with yourself, if you undermine your seeding with doubt, your seeding rots and decays. It doesn’t bear good fruit.

This can scare, and does scare, a lot of people away from seeding. I thought it was a very harsh statement when I started seeding. Now, it makes perfect sense and does show us that seeding presents us with a challenge from the outset: this “co-creating with God” is more than saying the words and demands from us a clear, loving, positive focus and the holding of that.

Once we get clear on what we want, we move to the very essence and heart of seeding, which is in the claim. This is having the faith to claim the result before it has arrived—a knowing that you have already received what it is you are seeding for. You can see what a delicate thing this can be. (The following was quoted earlier in the chapter “The Process of Creation” on page 29.)

J-R: This process of creation doesn’t care what we go toward. If you get negative doubts and thoughts, the process will manifest those for you. So in undertaking seeding, you must understand that it’s a real tightrope balance in terms of what you’re going to keep holding in your mind. If you start getting negative pictures or thoughts about something you’re seeding for, stop them immediately. You want to make sure you’ve got this thing going in the right direction all the time, and you have to watch your thoughts carefully.

Knowing how you’re going to get there is not as critical as knowing that you’re going to get there and, in that, not having any doubts, any second thoughts—nothing except the holding and the acting as though it is going to happen.

So, what do we do when the doubts come up and we can’t seem to stop them?

J-R: The solution is to grow up, learn to be mature, and handle it responsibly. There’s no way to do this except to really do it.

To end, here’s a quote from J-R from What’s It Like Being You?

Assume that you are healthy, assume that you are awake, assume that you are divine, assume that you have abundance. God didn’t put us on Earth and say, “Beg.” He said, “All I’ve got is yours.”

CRYSTAL CLEAR CONSCIOUSNESS

We make a lot of assumptions in life, and we can get into a mess by not checking them out and communicating clearly. We assume things that we later find out aren’t so. But before we dismiss assumption altogether, we should look at its positive side, its spiritual counterpart. When your consciousness is crystal clear, you can assume things and know that they are so. This is an entirely different process from ordinary assumption.

In the spiritual realm, first you know something, then you assume; you claim your knowing. As you assume this knowing, you become Soul, you become love, you become joy, you become health. In your heart, you become all those things.

Can you really become all those things? Do it now. Use the Law of Assumption for your upliftment and spiritual growth. Assume that you are healthy, assume that you are awake, assume that you are divine, assume that you have abundance.

When you live by the Law of Assumption, you cannot second guess or doubt yourself. There must be crystal clarity inside you, a deep, certain knowing, not merely belief.

From What’s It Like Being You? by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

To begin each year, we have an MSIA staff retreat at Prana. We are always supported by a superb team of volunteers, who are there in loving service to us and to the Traveler’s work. John Morton comes and shares with us each day. I recall one year where, in all the volunteer activity, one person stood out. He was working in the kitchen—one of the most demanding of jobs—with consistent enthusiasm and a high energy level throughout the long day. This person also happened to be 80 years old.

While I was chatting with some people over breakfast, the subject of the volunteer’s energy came up, and one of us mentioned that they had asked the person directly what his secret was. He had immediately answered, “Spirit does it.” Fortunately, he didn’t leave it at that and had gone away and pondered what his part in it was. He came back later and added, “I just expect the energy to be there.”

This got me thinking. No matter whether it is positive expectations, applying the Law of Assumption, or “making the claim,” there is a major part we play in our personal abundance, and it is not a passive one. J-R’s words came to me, part of an oft-repeated quote, and I really heard them for the first time: “To receive, you must be active.”

You state what you want very clearly. Then you claim it as already being here, which is conditioning the consciousness.

To receive, you need to act as though you have it.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

If I chase it, I separate into the chaser and the chased. If I am it, I am it and nothing else.
John C. Lilly

We all have the habit of thinking that everything around us is already a thing existing without our input, without our choice. We have to banish that kind of thinking.

Instead we really have to recognize that even the material world around us, the chairs, the tables, the rooms, the carpet, time included, all of these are nothing but possible movements of Consciousness. And I’m choosing, moment to moment, out of those movements, to bring my actual experience into manifestation.

This is the only radical thinking that we need to do. But it is so radical, it is so difficult, because our tendency is that the world is already out there, independent of our experience.

It is not. Quantum physics has been so clear about it. Heisenberg himself, co-discoverer of quantum physics, said, “Atoms are not things, they’re only tendencies.”

So instead of thinking of things, you have to think of possibilities. They’re all possibilities of consciousness.
Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED IS ALREADY INSIDE OF YOU

When you look at your business in terms of, “Well, I wonder if I’ll make money next year,” what are you doing to yourself?

“Will I have a job next year? I wonder if they’ll rehire me.” Probably not, because you’re manifesting lack.

You’re manifesting it. You’re creating it with your breath instead of saying, "Hey, next year I’ll have a job. I don’t care if it’s this job. But that job is going to be more abundantly alive, awakening me, than ever before, and God help me be strong enough to fulfill it the greatest way possible.”

From the CD Manifesting God’s Abundance by John-Roger, D.S.S.

It’s interesting what we humans will believe, and what we want to believe—and hold on to. And we’ll even defend our beliefs, often with our lives. It’s even more interesting that we are the ones making up all these beliefs! In examining lately what I buy into, I have been going back to basics. These two are from J-R’s The Way Out Book:

We are creators, and we are very adept at it. So when something happens in your life that you either like or dislike, take a look at what you did to bring it to yourself.

You are placed on the planet with everything that you need already inside of you. Everything is already there. You can’t be upset unless you allow it. You can’t be controlled unless you allow it. This puts you in a very unique position. You are a creator. You can create harmony or discord, happiness or despair, joy or depression, productiveness or lack.

Okay, so I guess that means I can’t blame the government for anything. I actually already have everything I need. And, if I have this correct, nothing can be taken away from me.

I’m stopping before my mind explodes.

Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cozily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.

From Transition by Iain M. Banks

Still a man hears what he wants to hear And disregards the rest

From the song “The Boxer” by Paul Simon

In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mind-set of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

Sufficiency is not a message about simplicity or about cutting back and lowering expectations. Sufficiency is an act of generating, distinguishing, making known to ourselves the power and presence of our existing resources, and our inner resources. Sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.

I am not suggesting that there is ample water in the desert. I am saying that even in the presence of genuine scarcity of external resources, the desire and capacity for self-sufficiency are innate and enough to meet the challenges we face. It is precisely when we turn our attentions to these inner resources—in fact, only when we do that—that we can begin to see more clearly the sufficiency in us and available to us. When we let go of the chase for more, and consciously examine and experience the resources we already have, we discover our resources are deeper than we knew or imagined. In the nourishment of our attention, our assets expand and grow.

From The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist

In this level we call Earth, we have greater freedom of choices than we do on other levels. In this land, the restrictions placed against us are primarily what we place against ourselves by taking who we think we are and wrapping it up in a myth or a superstition.
John-Roger, D.S.S.


IS THERE ANYTHING OUT THERE?

There’s nothing going on here, there’s no place to go, and when you get there, nothing’s happening.

All of your relationships are inside of you. There’s no relationship out there. There is only the reflection of what you are doing inside yourself and how you’re dealing with relationships inside of you, not out there.

Keep going. If you’re in an illusion, go through it. If you’re in truth, go on to greater truths.

Because the spiritual form is so simple and pure, it’s malleable; it can be molded into anything. It allows itself to be molded into various levels of consciousness.

The four quotes above are by John-Roger, D.S.S.

I had always understood the word illusion to mean something that didn’t really exist. Upon looking it up in the dictionary, I found that it has more to do with something that deceives. My favorite dictionary definition was “a false mental image produced by misinterpretation of things that actually exist.”

Of all the illusions on the planet, our relationship with money must be close to the top. Realizing its illusory nature (the government is printing it out of thin air, for goodness’ sake) and that any thoughts I have about it are entirely made up by myself, I have once again been turned inward. The world has a habit of doing that to me.

I’ve found that it’s not about what I have or don’t have, or how much or how little, it’s about consciousness, and that’s where I find my riches. And that’s why I tithe. I want my consciousness to be filled with gratitude, unconditional giving, and joy. I want to be plugged directly into the Source of abundance. So I make the simple yet profound gesture of tithing to give thanks for the abundance of blessings in my life, and to keep the channel open.

To support myself further, I have lately been finding myself being very careful about the way I mold the divine through my perceptions, words, and thinking. I avoid the old “if only I had” and “I can’t afford,” and I have also been refusing to be a victim to anything. Instead I have been choosing the fullness. I lack nothing. Imagine that we have everything we could want, that absolutely nothing could hurt or harm us, that nothing could be taken away, that everything we looked upon was absolutely perfect as it is, and that we were one with the Source of all things. Then we could all be blissfully relaxed, loving, joyful, and unconditional. Well, we don’t have to imagine it. That’s who we are.

Is there really a problem out there?

Being responsible for what I say or do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says or does is quite another. Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste, touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is in your life.

This means that terrorist activity, the president, the economy—anything you experience and don’t like—is up for you to heal. They don’t exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside you. The problem isn’t with them, it’s with you, and to change them, you have to change you.

In short, there is no out there.
Joe Vitale

What do we mean when we speak of “reality”? We usually mean the world that we sense. That world out there is made up of things that we can see, hear, taste, smell, and touch—real, solid, substantial objects of our everyday existence. We take it for granted that these things would exist in their same sensible form even if we were not there to observe them. Our observations simply verify an already existing reality.

Yet, that isn’t what quantum mechanics seems to be telling us. According to the tenets of the complementarity principle, there is no reality until that reality is perceived. Our perceptions of reality will, consequently, appear somewhat contradictory, dualistic, and paradoxical. The instantaneous experience of the reality of Now will not appear paradoxical at all. It is only when we observers attempt to construct a history of our perceptions that reality seems paradoxical.

The reason for this paradoxical appearance of reality—at least, atomic reality as observed by physicists—is that no clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we observe to exist outside of ourselves. Instead, reality depends upon our choices of what and how we choose to observe. These choices, in turn, depend upon our minds or, more specifically, the content of our thoughts. And our thoughts, in turn, depend upon our expectations, our desire for continuity.

If we choose to regard everything we see and do within the framework of the new physics, then we can say that, to some extent, reality construction is what we do every instant of our conscious lives. We accomplish this construction by choosing among the many alternatives incessantly offered to our minds.

The discovery of the Principle of Complementarity taught us that our everyday senses were not to be trusted to give a total view of reality. There was always a hidden, complementary side to everything we experienced.

But this hidden side is not actually present. For example, in the case of a coin that lands heads up, the hidden and complementary side is not real until it is revealed. Our actions in the world are always a compromise between two such opposites. The more we determine one side of reality, the less the other side is shown to us.

From Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Alan Wolf

OPEN TO INFINITE SUPPLY

An attitude of gratitude is another key to being in harmony with the formlessness of infinite supply. When you can honestly and truly thank God for what you have, for all your experiences, for all the people in your life, and for all your expressions, the sense of gratitude goes very deep. In that depth, you are open to infinite supply.

From Fulfilling Your Spiritual Promise by John-Roger, D.S.S.

Sometimes I wonder if the whole key to abundance can be as simple as being grateful. Being grateful moves me to a wonderful expansive place, surrounded by grace. So maybe it is that simple.

A friend of mine is dealing with cancer throughout his body, yet his expression is one of such gratitude that there is a saintly quality about him. By profoundly appreciating as gifts the simplest things in life, like moving his body and breathing air, those who come into his presence are lifted.

Tithing says, “Thank you,” in a deep, resonant, and sacred way. It is a clear way of expressing our gratitude to God and is also a form of dynamic giving that can set us free. Not everyone can see the door to freedom. It requires an openness and intent to see new possibilities beyond our brain’s conditioned hardwiring.

The spiritual principles of abundance and prosperity really kick in when we not only give thanks through tithing but also say thank you to ourselves for our part in being open to receive. In this form of gratitude, we can demonstrate our appreciation for our basic self’s role in bringing abundance to us by creating a money magnet. I recently received two emails on the joy of doing just that.

About a week ago, I found the “God is My Partner” article you wrote several months ago about how to create a money magnet. I left it out for my husband to read and to see what he thought about creating a money magnet together. After reading the article, he was really excited about doing it, so we got an envelope and put $300 in cash in it. The $300 was 10% of $3,000 my husband just received from a client. We also tithed 10%, too.

Almost every day I took the money out and looked at it, touched it, and told my Basic Self how wonderful the money felt and that I was open to receiving more.

This past Saturday, I went to the mailbox and there was a letter addressed to me from UCLA Medical Center. The last time I was at UCLA Medical Center was when I delivered my son, almost two years ago. I opened it and inside there was a check for $872.04. The letter stated UCLA just completed a recent audit and I received this money due to “duplicate or overpayment from you.”

I was so shocked! The money magnet worked! I deposited the money in our bank account today and took 10% ($87) out to add to the money magnet.

Thank you so much for sharing J-R’s wisdom and how a money magnet works. It was a powerful experience to say the least! God is good.

A.H.


I thank you and bless you for your support with my money magnet. I kept it going and I now know that I must tithe 10% to God and 10% to myself. It’s a given in my heart.

M.R.

For more information on how to create a money magnet, see Volume II of this series.

One of the most beautiful and gratifying of all prayers is just saying, “Thanks.” In reality, that is the only prayer necessary.

From Timeless Wisdoms, Volume One, by John-Roger

Our brains create order out of what would otherwise seem like utter chaos. As they take in stimuli and organize them into useful patterns—that is, information—we develop an inner vision, or model, of what our world is about. When these patterns are successful enough, our brain then imposes that model, or vision, on the external environment and on our experience.

The brain takes in stimulation from the world around us and within us, and organizes it according to knowledge it already has. Everything we have learned and that we hold in our brains, comes into play to “make sense of ” the world. While it may seem that one thing is good and another is bad, that certain situations are threatening and others safe, it is our brain that has learned to interpret them as such. What we hold in our brains may even determine the possibilities we see or fail to see for our lives.

The story is often told that when Magellan and his crew landed in the Pacific islands, the natives asked how they had gotten there. When the sailors pointed to their large ships on the horizon, the natives could not see them. Though there was nothing wrong with the natives’ eyesight, the
large ships were invisible to them. Their brains simply lacked the information to make sense of what they saw—or didn’t see—out there.

When we only rely on what we already know—or what we believe we know—we create the same experiences for ourselves over and over again, no matter what comes our way.
Anat Baniel from Move Into Life

In music, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness… I see what people call God in all these things.
Pablo Casals


THE ONLY PRAYER NECESSARY

Then I realized that Spirit is its own reward. Happiness is its own reward. Loving is its own reward. The ability to serve is its own reward. The ability to give is its own reward. The ability to receive is its own reward.

Suddenly, it was really clear to me that it is inside of me where the whole makeup of creation resides. If I’m doing things to get a reward, to get recognition or delight from anyone out there in the world, I’m doing it completely backwards.

So I started doing things for me, which I have found is the best approach. To love your neighbor as yourself carries the inference that you are to love yourself so that you can love your neighbor. I realized it was also my responsibility to love the neighbor inside of me. That came in like a rush of wind from heaven.

It was really a beautiful feeling to know and say, “Yes, there are many times I have missed the mark, but I’m in the glory of God.” Then it hit me—everybody is in the glory of God—everyone is in that.

From Giving and Serving: Gateways to Higher Consciousness
by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

I’m still working with and being inspired by a quote from J-R in the previous chapter:

One of the most beautiful and gratifying of all prayers is just saying, “Thanks.” In reality, that is the only prayer necessary.

Since reading that quote, praying for me has never been so simple, genuine, or heartfelt. Now I get to work with this chapter’s quote, which says that “the whole makeup of creation resides” in me. Now that really takes the fun out of being negative, upset, and righteous with what’s going on in the world these days.

Still, I’ve got the solution—saying “Thanks!” to everything.

This is from National Public Radio’s This I Believe:

In Giving I Connect with Others by Isabel Allende:

I have lived with passion and in a hurry, trying to accomplish too many things. I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year and I took care of her at home, until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

During that year of agony and the following year of my grieving, everything stopped for me. There was nothing to do—just cry and remember. However, that year also gave an opportunity to reflect upon my journey and the principles that hold me together. I discovered that there is consistency in my beliefs, my writing and the way I lead my life. I have not changed, I am still the same girl I was fifty years ago, and the same young woman I was in the seventies. I still lust for life, I am still ferociously independent, I still crave justice and I fall madly in love easily.

Paralyzed and silent in her bed, my daughter Paula taught me a lesson that is now my mantra: You only have what you give. It’s by spending yourself that you become rich. Paula led a life of service. She worked as a volunteer helping women and children, eight hours a day, six days a week. She never had any money, but she needed very little. When she died she had nothing and she needed nothing. During her illness I had to let go of everything: her laughter, her voice, her grace, her beauty, her company and finally her spirit. When she died I thought I had lost everything. But then I realized I still had the love I had given her. I don’t even know if she was able to receive that love. She could not respond in any way, her eyes were somber pools that reflected no light. But I was full of love and that love keeps growing and multiplying and giving fruit.

The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential. Because of Paula, I don’t cling to anything anymore. Now I like to give much more than to receive. I am happier when I love than when I am loved. I adore my husband, my son, my grandchildren, my mother, my dog, and frankly I don’t know if they even like me. But who cares? Loving them is my joy.

Give, give, give—what is the point of having experience, knowledge or talent if I don’t give it away? Of having stories if I don’t tell them to others? Of having wealth if I don’t share it? I don’t intend to be cremated with any of it! It is in giving that I connect with others, with the world and with the divine.

It is in giving that I feel the spirit of my daughter inside me, like a soft presence.


For it is in giving that we receive.

St. Francis of Assisi

THE FREEDOM TO FOCUS ON THE SPIRIT

Our job is to overcome our lower nature so we can live in the awareness of our Soul. When we tithe to the church or God, we are making the material world let go of us. So tithing is also part of a spiritual law and assists us in getting free of materialistic confinement.

When one person becomes free of materiality, it’s like an infection going the other way. Instead of greed affecting honest people, honest people start affecting the greedy. You let go and give to God, joyfully and unconditionally.

From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

I love reading books. And I love buying them on Amazon. Every time a package arrives, it’s like receiving a Christmas present. Needless to say I have bought a lot of books. So this year my new year’s resolution was to not buy any new books until I had read at least some of what I had already bought. So far, I have lasted two months. Though I doubt whether I can hold on for much longer, the idea of using what I have, whether it’s clothes, books, or even food, rather than acquiring something new, has stuck with me.

Recently, in separate conversations with two friends, both said to me that they were cleaning out their closets and giving away what they were no longer using. Both of them radiated a new-found freedom.

We come into this world naked, with nothing, and yet perfect. From time to time I wonder about this human need to acquire more and more.

The recommendation for warriors is not to have any material things on which to focus their power, but to focus it on the spirit, on the true flight into the unknown, not on trivialities.

Everyone who wants to follow the warrior’s path has to rid themselves of the compulsion to possess and hold on to things.

From The Eagle’s Gift by Carlos Castaneda

For many men the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them. What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.
Seneca

We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant—the liberation from material attachments; the unbribed soul; the paying our way by what we are or do, and not by what we have.
William James

Dear Paul,

Driving around the other day, my husband and I saw a young woman begging at the side of the street. The dirtiness of her convinced me that she was homeless. We stopped to give her some money and I was blown away by the amount of gratitude that came from her. I remember thinking to myself, “With this attitude, she’s not going to be on the street very long.” Sure enough we saw her soon after, by a park. She and her disabled boyfriend had found housing and a job.

Before tithing, I used to have a fear of ending up homeless. The fear banished with tithing and now I see that, in addition, I can always do like this lady did and stay in gratitude. Gratitude, perhaps, is homeless insurance.
J.L.


JOY, DYNAMICALLY MOVING THROUGH YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS

When I talk about prosperity, however, the material area is secondary. What good are all the goodies if you don’t have the capacity to enjoy them? If your inner life is filled with anguish and anxiety, all the outer accoutrements do not add up to a life of prosperity. In order to truly enjoy physical luxury and comfort, you need to have the capacity for joy within you.

From Wealth and Higher Consciousness by John-Roger, D.S.S.

I am still attempting to “get” joy. Or, rather, access it on a more frequent basis. Last year two incidents brought this to my attention. The first was an ocular migraine triggered, in my particular case, by wheat or chocolate. I don’t get a headache, but it really messes with my vision, and I am unable to focus clearly on any object. It usually passes in 30 minutes or so, but this one lingered and my vision did not clear. A cold sweat and a feeling of dread came over me. Fortunately, after I just closed my eyes and decided to wait it out, it did clear from my visual field. I felt extremely grateful.

The next day in a moment of utter spaciness, I stopped the car in the Prana parking lot and exited from my car not only with the engine still running but with it still in drive. I turned reflexively and put the brake on but was left with the thought that had I missed the brake, the car would have ended nose down in the meditation garden. Again, I was shaken but extremely grateful.

These incidents did get me to ponder why I wasn’t being joyful in my life after going through them. After all, I could now see and I was not hurt. And why not, instead of being just simply joyful, be ecstatically joyful? Perhaps I bordered on joyful for a few moments, but I soon returned to my routine. Throughout the week, however, I returned to pondering why I don’t experience joy more often.

It took a while but I finally got clear about it. I am not a here-and-now person. I tend to be mostly a there-and-then person, very future-oriented. And in the future I manage to find plenty to be worried and concerned about. I do deal with my worries and concerns, but, much like the old British Redcoats, as soon as one worry or concern falls away, another briskly steps up and seamlessly fills its place. A similar process takes place with my minor aches and pains.

Meanwhile, inside me, joy sits languidly in the background, unconcerned, waiting patiently for me to tear myself away from my preoccupations and give it some attention, and with even the slightest nod its way, it springs forth with startling innocence and enthusiasm, leaving me mystified as to why I didn’t think to do it earlier.

One of my favorite authors is philosopher, humorist, and fellow worrier, Alain de Botton. In his book The Art of Travel he describes being in need of a break from London’s grey, cold, and rainy winter weather and, upon seeing a travel brochure featuring a beautiful view of a Barbados beach, decides to travel there.

I found a deck chair at the edge of the sea. I could hear small lapping sounds beside me, as if a kindly monster were taking discreet sips of water from a large goblet. A few birds were waking up and beginning to career through the air in matinal excitement. Behind me, the rafia roofs of the hotel bungalows were visible through gaps in the trees. Before me was a view I recognized from the brochure: the beach stretching away in a gentle curve towards the tip of the bay, with jungle-covered hills behind, and the first row of coconut trees inclining irregularly towards the turquoise sea, as though some of them were craning their necks to catch a better angle of the sun.

Yet this description only imperfectly reflects what occurred within me that morning, for my attention was in truth far more fractured and confused than the foregoing paragraph suggests. I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air in matinal excitement, but my awareness of them was weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements, among them a sore throat I had developed during the flight, worry over not having informed a colleague that I would be away, a pressure across both temples, and a rising need to visit the bathroom. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

From The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton

Joy, dynamically moving through your consciousness, changing, altering, updating, making all things new, is indicative of the presence of Spirit.

From The Way Out Book by John-Roger

Jacques Lusseyran, a hero of the French Resistance in World War II, was blind. Despite his total blindness Jacques could see an inner radiance and light in people but only when he was in a loving place. When he was experiencing anger, impatience, competitiveness, or fear, he found that this light immediately dimmed or went out altogether. In those moments, he recounts, he felt truly blind.

During World War II, after the Nazis occupied France, Lusseyran joined the Resistance. He was captured and sent to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Of the two thousand French interned there, Lusseyran was one of only thirty who survived. Later, he wrote that his experience in the camp confirmed two important truths: “that each person’s life is shaped from the inside; that fear kills, but joy sustains life.”

At Buchenwald, Lusseyran met a remarkable old man named Jeremy, who, despite the wretched conditions in the camp, radiated a joyful and healing presence. Jeremy managed not to judge the situation or his captors and never thought of himself as a victim or as one of the good guys against the bad. To Jeremy it was simply human beings carrying on as usual. In regular life he had seen people living in fear and doing harm to themselves. It was the same in the camp; only the setting differed. Jeremy observed that Buchenwald was within each of us, and “since it was our minds that made it a hell and stoked its horrors, we had the power within us to choose differently.”

Lusseyran writes:

Jeremy found joy in the midst of Block 57. He found it during moments of the day when others found only fear. And he found it in such great abundance that when he was present we felt it rise in us.

What joy? The joy of being alive in this moment, in the next, each time we become aware of it. The joy of discovering that joy exists, that it is in us just exactly as life is, without conditions and which no condition, even the worst, can kill. This benediction [of joy] had no end. And, when it ceased, it was that we had ceased wanting it, that we—and not it—had ceased being joyful.

Jeremy had escaped from the network of compulsive reflexes and had touched the very depth of himself and liberated the essential, that which does not depend on any circumstance, which can exist in all places and in any time, in pain as in pleasure. But Jeremy was not happy: he was joyous. The good which he enjoyed was not his. Or rather, it was—but by participation. It was just as much ours.

Excerpted from the story “Jeremy” in Against the Pollution of the I: Selected Writings of Jacques Lusseyran. The story recounts Lusseyran’s experience in the German concentration camp of Buchenwald in World War II. Lusseyran survived the camp. Jeremy died there.

The most radical thing we can do in this world is be joyful.

Patch Adams, M.D.


THE GLORY IN THE HUMAN BEING

When we tithe, two levels are activated—a level here in this world and, at the
same time, a mystical, invisible level. The mystical is a communication saying,
“You are abundant and handle abundance well, so here’s some more.”

The other level, in this world, is when we look at our abundance and contribute
joyfully through tithing. We are actually cheerful about it. This action sets up a countenance that is a form of glory in the human being, and that glory attracts more abundance.
From God Is Your Partner by John-Roger, D.S.S.

Recently, upon entering the ballet studio where I train, I was greeted by a most
wonderful open smile. A young ballerina was saying hello. I had not seen or met her before. She turned out to be a fine dancer, and her face radiated that same quality of good-humored openness throughout the class.

Though I have not seen her in class since, the impression of her openness lingered and took me back to when I was around eight years old and my mother was taking me along with her when she visited her uncles. They were bespoke tailors, and the visit to Berner Street, in the heart of London’s West End, included a long climb up wooden, carpetless, creaky stairs. At the end of the hallway we would knock on the door and enter a large room filled with the thick smoke of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars. There, my four uncles sat—sewing by hand and by machine, and cutting cloth. They were fairly aloof men, but from out of the smoke Uncle Moss would emerge with his arms outstretched and a large welcoming grin and presence that radiated how glad he was to see my mother and me. His graciousness was exactly what an insecure eight-year-old boy needed, and I recall feeling relieved to see him, and being relaxed and happy as a result.

I wonder why such moments stand out. They are ordinary events. Nothing happened. Yet they etch themselves into our memory as highly significant. Another childhood memory comes to mind—the twinkle in the eyes and beatific look on the face of my Uncle Alf as chaos ensued when I accidently knocked over the Passover wine bottle onto the pristine white tablecloth during Seder dinner. The image of wise understanding on his face still inspires me fifty years later.

And I am in MSIA because of John-Roger’s twinkle, his warmth, his welcome, and his unconditional loving for me many years ago. Apparently, I need grace in my life through the kindness of others. Perhaps we all do. And we all have the power to radiate it.

If you will strive to have a pleasant disposition while you’re doing whatever you’re doing in the world, there is a greater tendency for your Soul, which is so perfect and so loving, to radiate out of your pleasant disposition. A truly pleasant disposition is loving, compassionate, and empathic, with the ability to know what’s going on in the world, because it is not run by the ego. If you take that same pleasantness back inside you, you live with an abundance of enthusiasm that overflows to others. Now, that is truly helping the planet.

From What’s It Like Being You: Living Life as the True Self
by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

I do not know if there is a greater blessing than to encounter a true old person, that is, one who is joyous. It is a blessing which is rarely given to us, because for most, alas, age is nothing but the blank and degrading addition of physical years. But when an old person is joyful, he is so strong that he no longer needs to speak: he comes and he heals. The one who fills my memory is like this. His name is Jeremy Regard.

Without a doubt, there exist in certain beings, as there existed in him, a rightness and wholeness so perfect that their way of seeing communicates itself, is given to you, for at least an instant. And the silence then is truer, more exact, than any words.

One went to Jeremy as toward a spring. One didn’t ask oneself why. One didn’t think about it. In this ocean of rage and suffering there was this island: a man who didn’t shout, who asked no one for help, who was sufficient unto himself. He had touched the very depth of himself and liberated the supernatural or, if this word bothers you, the essential, that which does not depend on any circumstance, which can exist in all places and in any time, in pain as in pleasure. He had encountered the very source of life. If I have used the word “supernatural,” it is because the act of Jeremy sums up to me the religious act itself: the discovery that God is there, in each person, to the same degree, completely in each moment, and that a return can be made toward Him.

Excerpted from the story “Jeremy” in Against the Pollution of the I:
Selected Writings of Jacques Lusseyran

There are people whose expectations are different than most of ours. These are people who have made the transition to adulthood and not lost the innocence, joy and power of childhood. They are rare but perhaps you have been fortunate enough to know one of them. These exceptional people are content as they are—where they are. They are more responsive to beauty. They are less driven by egocentric needs and more helpful and responsive to the needs of others. They are less fearful. They are creative, innovative, and playful. They are loveable and have an impish sense of humor. You may find yourself being drawn to them and perhaps thinking, “This is a wonderful human being. If we could all be like her our world would be a safe and beautiful place.” Abraham Maslow calls these people “Transcenders.”

From Beyond Happiness by Frank J. Kinslow

YOU ARE A PORTABLE GIFT

What is the most beautiful gift you can give? The gift of yourself.

So often we get caught up in trying to find the perfect gift or greeting card or in trying to find the right words to say to someone. And although it’s nice to express our love in these ways, the simplest and most precious gift you have to give resides inside of yourself.

For many of us, that’s a difficult thing to accept. We tend to look outside ourselves and enter the “comparing” game. Everyone else seems to have more talent, money, happiness—more of everything we think we want. And yet, the reality is that everything you’ve ever wanted or dreamed of having or being is completely intact within yourself.

You are a portable gift ready to participate at any given moment. It may be giving a smile or being patient. While one person has the gift of laughter, another person blesses us with the silence and peace they exude. Each one of us is important!

From Serving and Giving: Gateways to Higher Consciousness
by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

One of the core spiritual principles of abundance and prosperity is giving. Yet, I had never really understood or taken in J-R’s words above. They sounded sweet, but I did not have the inner experience that went with them. Then I read this post from Seth Godin, and all of a sudden it came to life for me and I realized that I have more to give than I ever thought.

What’s a gift?

I met a big-shot former Fortune 500 company CEO who explained to me that he used to have three secretaries. One for his calendar, one for his usual work, and one who did nothing but send people gifts.

I think when it’s sent by a corporation and chosen by a secretary, it’s not a gift. It’s a present. Or a favor.

A gift certificate from a rich uncle is a present as well, it’s not really a gift.

A favor is something we do for someone hoping for an equal or greater favor in return. (Hence the phrase, “return the favor.” No one says, “return the gift.”)

A present is something that costs money, sure, and it’s free, but I don’t think it’s a gift.

A gift costs the giver something real. It might be cash (enough that we feel the pinch) but more likely it involves a sacrifice or a risk or an emotional exposure. A true gift is a heartfelt connection, something that changes both the giver and the recipient.

The Gift of the Magi is a great story because each person in the story sacrifices to create a heartfelt gift for the other person. And it’s gifts—gifts that touch us, gifts that change us—that are transforming the way we interact.

One or two readers asked me why my book Linchpin costs money. After all, they ask, if gifts are a cornerstone of the new era, why not give it away free, as a gift?

Free doesn’t make something a gift. Free might be a marketing strategy, free might make a generous present, but free doesn’t automatically make something a gift. Gil Scott Heron’s new album isn’t free, but it’s a gift. He’s exposing himself. Taking a risk. You listen to the album and you feel differently when you’re done… it’s not a product, it’s a very personal statement. Keller Williams approaches his entire craft as a chance to give gifts, but that doesn’t mean he can’t charge for some elements of his work. What it took him to create the music is so much greater than what it cost you to consume it that he is giving gifts without doubt.

The way I understand gifts is that the giver must make a sacrifice, create an uneven exchange, bring himself closer to the recipient, create change and do it all with the right spirit. To do anything less might be smart commerce, but it doesn’t rise to the magical level of the gift. A day’s work for a day’s pay is the win/lose mantra of the industrial era. More modern is to view a day’s work as a chance to generate gifts that last.

(PK: The origin of the word sacrifice is to make holy. It’s where we also get the word sacred from.)

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Winston Churchill

Raj Kaliya Dhanuk sits on a wooden bench, barefoot, with a tattered sari covering thin arms as rough as bark. Dhanuk and more than 500 others—most of whom have never seen a doctor before—have traveled for days by bicycle, motorbike, bus and even on their relatives’ backs to reach Dr. Sanduk Ruit’s mobile eye camp.

Ruit estimates sight has been restored to about 3 or 4 million people through his method. Most of them live in the developing world, where a loss of vision can be worse than death because of the added burden thrust on families already drowning in hardship. The soft-spoken portly doctor in acid-washed jeans and sneakers guesses he alone has removed 100,000 cataracts over his 30-year career.

“You realize there are drops which make an ocean,” says Ruit, 55, an ethnic Sherpa who grew up poor in a remote mountain village on the border near Tibet.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Dr. Paul Yang, chief resident at the University of Utah’s Moran Eye Center, who came to the Nepal eye camp to learn Ruit’s trademark technique. “In the U.S., all the technology is more modern and more optimized, but it can’t compete with the volume here. You take back what’s learned here and apply it elsewhere for your whole life.”

Dhanuk is one of three elderly women at this camp who’s blind in both eyes from cataracts. All she really wants is to be able to feed herself again, go to the toilet alone and get back to her chores. She doesn’t want to be lonely and frightened in one of the world’s poorest countries, where life is as harsh and rugged as the Himalayas that shape it.

As soon as the bandages are removed, her face fills with life. After nearly a year of total blindness, Dhanuk drinks in the blue sky, the green grass and all the other patients around her. She easily counts fingers, and then Ruit asks her to squeeze his nose if she can see it. It only takes a second for her to jump up and grab it with both hands. Applause erupts in this moment Ruit calls the power of vision.

“Dr. Ruit is as skilled as any cataract surgeon I know, and I suppose it is natural to wonder what he could earn with these same skills in an affluent country,” says Dr. David Chang, a prominent cataract surgeon from the University of California, San Francisco.

Ruit admits life could have been much more comfortable if he’d simply left Nepal for a job in the West. But not many people have the opportunity he has had to make life better for others, he says.

“This is really too good for money,” he says.

From The Seattle Times, March 20, 2010, by Margie Mason

WINNING IN YOUR FANTASY

Don’t lose in your fantasy. Always win in your fantasy because you’re making it up. Don’t make it up as bad; make it up as good.

When you worry, you’re holding pictures in your mind that you want less of, but the law of Spirit says, “What you focus upon, you become. What you focus on comes to you.” So hold in your mind what you want more of…

So don’t worry about the future. When you’re not living in expectation, you’re less likely to be caught in negativity. Don’t live in the imagination of what might happen. Instead, visualize the presence of God so you can have that. Then if you walk into any negativity, you walk right on through.

And don’t worry about the past. You cannot live yesterday. Memory isn’t what the heart desires. The heart desires fulfillment now, on this level, in this moment. So don’t be concerned about yourself. All things are already being taken care of. The true self is moving you forward on your divine destiny, and you do not have to look at your past actions.

From Timeless Wisdoms, Volume One, by John-Roger, D.S.S.

There certainly seems a lot to worry about these days. It’s a veritable banquet for a spiritual worrier like myself. I was watching a movie the other day called The Limits of Control, written and directed by Jim Jarmusch and starring Isaach De Bankole. It’s one of those movies that after watching and enjoying it, I then spent the evening on the Internet trying to figure out, through reviews and
commentaries, what it was about.

I struck gold when I found this sentence from a review by Kelly Jane Torrance writing in The Washington Times: “There is a deliberateness, both to Mr. De Bankole and to this film, that make it utterly gripping and, yes, satisfying—as long as you’re not one of those people who expects to understand the motivations of another human being.”

“As long as you’re not one of those people who expects to understand the motivations of another human being.” Wow. And with that comment, my worries started falling like dominoes.

In the movie Annie Hall, the mother of a young Woody Allen takes him to a shrink and he says to the therapist, “How can I relax when the universe is expanding?”

And his mother says, “You live in Brooklyn! Brooklyn isn’t expanding!”

Dan Pallotta writing in the Harvard Business Review

A few years ago, after her sister was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, Akaya Windwood made the decision to stop worrying:

I realized that worry had never changed the outcome of whatever I was worried about. Not once. The only thing worry did was to affect how I felt and experienced what was happening. And it never made me feel better. Not once.

So, I made a decision not to worry. Ever. I began to understand that it was a habit of my mind. My heart doesn’t worry, my body doesn’t worry, only my head does. But it wasn’t enough to just not worry; I needed to replace the habit of worry with something else, and I chose trust.

Much to my surprise, I found that not worrying increased my capacity to attend to what was in front of me. All that energy I’d been using to worry was freed up for me to use in much more creative and interesting ways.

Our worry affects those around us, even when we think we are “managing” it well. When I stopped worrying, it made a big difference in how I showed up in meetings, to my partner, and with my friends and family. I became much more effective. And people noticed.

There’s a saying that worry is a prayer invoking that which we don’t want. How might you care for, love and attend to those around you without bringing a cloud of worry?

In the coming years, we are going to need leaders who are of clear heart, vision, and mind. Leading from a place of clarity rather than worry could be one of our greatest tools. It frees us to be increasingly creative, inspirational, and effective.

From the article “Life After Worry” by Akaya Windwood


ENDURING TO THE END

There is only one message from God, although there are many ways that it’s said and many ways that it’s expressed. That one message is that all things come from God. Everything has its existence because God is.

There is great security in knowing this. God is multi-dimensional; God is everywhere, in all things and in all levels of consciousness. So the things that appear to be negative are only learning devices, not punishments.

From Timeless Wisdoms, Volume One, by John-Roger, D.S.S.

On a trip to the East Coast, a while back, someone started chatting with me about a person who had left MSIA many years ago. As I didn’t know the person who had left, I was fascinated to hear that J-R had said that the person was extraordinarily gifted spiritually. The person telling me this said that they had learned a lot from the situation. They said, “Just having spiritual gifts doesn’t get you there. What gets you there is persistence and enduring to the end.”

This hit a chord for me because many years ago I was compiling a book on spiritual exercises that became Walking with the Lord. It’s usually a rewarding and enjoyable experience delving into J-R’s words. However, in this case, I found myself becoming increasingly confused and irritated, and wondering and questioning what MSIA and Soul Transcendence were all about.
About this time, MSIA’s annual Conference came around, and at the start of a seminar J-R immediately walked over to the section in which I was sitting and said, “About the only thing I can say about Soul Transcendence is that he wins who endures to the end.” Everything immediately cleared up for me. And those words became the closing words of Walking with the Lord.

I think it’s part of human nature to be looking for the secret. Hence the success of books which proclaim to give it. But perhaps the real secret is that there is none. It’s in plain sight if we open our eyes. And just maybe the secret to prosperity and abundance is to be aware of how and on what we are spending our money. By far the best way I know to do that is to make a budget. It sounds so mundane, and yet it works so well.

It can be hard to take an honest and clear look at what we are doing, but it is worth the effort. It’s amazing how much energy it frees up and how life can realign in response. You don’t have to be an accountant to do this, but you do need to figure out how much you are spending each month in the various areas of your life, such as, clothing, groceries, rent, entertainment, etc.

If you are considering doing this for the first time, the most basic approach is to make an envelope for each category and put cash in it for the amount you are budgeting. You don’t allow yourself to spend more than is in the envelope. This is a simple way to start, and there are many variations on that theme.

Most bad management is as simple as not being willing to look. Budgeting makes us look. In addition to tithing and seeding, which to me are the consciousness basis of abundance and prosperity, the two most significant things I have done to affect my personal finances for the better are starting a money magnet and budgeting.

It is said sometimes that the great teachers and mentors, the rabbis and gurus, achieve their ends by inducting the disciple into a kind of secret circle of knowledge and belief, that they make of their charisma a kind of gift. The more I think about it, though, the more I suspect that the best teachers—and, for that matter, the truly long-term winning coaches, the Walshes and Woodens and Weavers—do something else. They don’t mystify the work and offer themselves as a model of rabbinical authority, a practice that nearly always lapses into a history of acolytes and excommunications. The real teachers and coaches may offer a charismatic model—they probably have to—but then they insist that all the magic they have to offer is a commitment to repetition and perseverance.

From The New Yorker, March 2008, by Adam Gopnik

Jim Wang writing in his blog at bargaineering.com has this to say on budgeting, with the utmost clarity:

FAILING TO BUDGET CAN BE ONE OF THE MOST DAMAGING THINGS YOU CAN DO TO YOUR PERSONAL FINANCES. Without a clear picture of how much you’re spending and on what, you’re basically wandering the forest at night without a flashlight.

YOU CAN’T IMPROVE WHAT YOU AREN’T TRACKING. You should always be trying to lower your expenses while maintaining the same standard of living. If you frequently shop at a particular store, it’s smart to try to find coupons so you get the same for less. If you like a particular food or drink, it pays to test out cheaper alternatives to see if you can tell the difference. Where you save in one area, you can then splurge in another. With a budget, you can tell where you stand the greatest chance of improvement. You may discover patterns you didn’t know beforehand.

YOU WILL AUTOMATICALLY IMPROVE JUST BY TRACKING. When I started working full-time, I had a budget where I tracked every expense to the penny. By virtue of doing that, my actions were affected by even recording the expense. I packed a lunch because my dining out expenses were nearing budget limits.

BUDGETS HELP YOU MAKE INFORMED DECISIONS. With a budget and an accurate picture of your spending, you can make an informed decision. If you know you have slack in the budget, you can enjoy yourself more knowing that you’re safe. A vacation? You can happily go without guilt or concern if you know your budget can handle it. How long will it take for you to build up your emergency fund? With a budget, you now know.

Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.

Confucius

The late Canadian magician, Doug Henning, once put it:

The hard must become habit.
The habit must become easy.
The easy must become beautiful.

THE POWER OF LIMITS

Perfect your beingness by going slowly through the routine of your life until you have it mastered.

Do the ordinary things that make up your life. Learn to do those things to the point of mastery. You’ll find great satisfaction in them.

Taking on new projects is not necessarily a positive change. It may be a sign of recklessness and nonfulfillment. But going back to all the levels of noncompletion and completing them is a sign of positive change.

From The Tao of Spirit by John-Roger, D.S.S.

A lot of New Age teachings center around the premise that we are unlimited spiritual beings, and New Age literature uses that to springboard into the idea that unlimited abundance awaits us, usually in the form of large amounts of money or a big house in a bucolic setting, and we can have anything we want or desire if we let go of limitations.

It seems to me that this is a trap. We are led to believe, once again, that abundance, prosperity, and riches are something to be sought outside ourselves. But to me the bigger problem with this approach is that the mechanics are all wrong. There is no springboard, thus no bounce.

It’s somewhat of a counterintuitive leap to see that it is gravity that enables us to stand tall. That which seems to pull us down actually enables us to expand upwards.

Last week, I shared the following quote from Johann Goethe with someone close to me:

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.

89

The person was immersed in a lot of exciting, creative projects and was overwhelmed and exhausted by the incompletions that were building up. They didn’t understand the quote until I asked them to see it in the context of yet another additional exciting and creative project that they were being offered.

It has always fascinated me that creativity is often born out of limitation. It just may be that limitation is the springboard into abundance, just as the physical realm is the springboard into the Spirit.

One of my favorite scenes from a movie happens to be a great example of the use of limitation. In Apollo 13, the space capsule is returning from the moon with three astronauts aboard. There was very little power left and the capsule was rapidly running out of oxygen due to a malfunction in the system. The team of engineers in Houston had to figure out how to fix the problem using only a few odds and ends that were available to the astronauts in their spacecraft. Due to the time constraints, there was no room for error; it had to be right the first time. The engineers stared at the ragtag assortment of available things and then immediately got to work and came up with a unique design using plastic bags, cardboard, and duct tape to save the astronauts. Incredibly, the scene accurately depicted what actually happened in real life.

The next time we feel that we don’t have enough money or we can’t have what we want or we are in too much debt, instead of seeing it as a negative, we can see it as an opportunity for creativity. Instead of feeling disempowered by what we are faced with, we can use the power of limits to expand.

New organs of perception come into being as a result of necessity.

Therefore, O man, increase your necessity, so that you may increase your perception.
Jalal al-Din Rumi

One way to tell if you are functioning in alignment with the Spirit is to see if you complete things in the world. If you have too many jobs or too many things to do, cut out some of them. Be wise. Do not take on more than you can handle.

From Fulfilling Your Spiritual Promise by John-Roger, D.S.S.

When we look deeply into the patterns of an apple blossom, a seashell, or a swinging pendulum, we discover a perfection, an incredible order, that awakens in us a sense of awe that we knew as children. Something reveals itself that is infinitely greater than we are and yet part of us; the limitless emerges from limits.

The proportions of nature, art, and architecture can help us in this effort, for these proportions are shared limitations that create harmonious relationships out of differences. Thus they teach us that limitations are not just restrictive, but they also are creative. That these basic pattern forming processes, operating within strict limits, create limitless varieties of shapes and harmonies.

From The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies
in Nature, Art, and Architecture by Gyorgy Doczi


Gravity is a constraint. If you’re designing an airplane, it would be a lot easier without gravity as a concern, but hey, it’s not going away.

A problem is solvable. A constraint must be lived with.

For years, Apple viewed retail distribution as a constraint. They had to live with cranky independent computer stores, or big box mass merchants that didn’t display or sell their products well.

Using the Internet and then their own stores, they eventually realized that this was actually a problem that could be solved, and it changed everything for them.

On the other hand, there are countless entrepreneurs who believe they can solve problems relating to funding or technology that are out of reach given their scale or background. They’d be better off if they accepted them as constraints and designed around them.

The art is in telling them apart.
Seth Godin

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Igor Stravinsky

Commitment to a set of rules (a game) frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be “free,” but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.

If certain values are constrained within narrow limits, others are free to vary more strongly. Thus, for example, string quartets, solos, and other limited forms may achieve greater emotional intensity than symphonies, and black-and-white photography may achieve greater power than color. In ragas, or solo jazz play, sounds are limited to a restricted sphere, within which a gigantic range of inventiveness opens up. If you have all the colors available, you are sometimes almost too free. With one dimension constrained, play becomes freer in other dimensions.

There is a French word, bricolage, which means making do with the material at hand. The bricoleur is an artist of limits. Bricolage implies what mathematicians like to call “elegance,” that is, such economy of statement that a single line of thought has a great many implications and outcomes. In the same vein, Beethoven, writing of his favorite composer, Handel, felt that the measure of music is “producing great results from scant means.”

Antonio Stradivari made some of his most beautiful violins from a pile of broken, waterlogged oars he found on the docks in Venice one day. This transmutation through creative vision is the actual, day-to-day realization of alchemy. In bricolage, we take the ordinary materials in our hands and turn them into new living matter. The fulcrum of the transformation is mind-at-play, having nothing to gain and nothing to lose, working and playing around the limits and resistances of the tools we hold in our hands.

From Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch


NO TENSION, NO LACK, NO PRESSURE

If you know that you are one with the source, then you don’t feel tense or needy. You don’t feel lack or pressure. You’re poised. You’re silent. You’re peaceful. You can work harmoniously with anything that comes your way and then let it go, because you are free.

From What’s It Like Being You? by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

I came across this quote the other day, and since then it has become somewhat of a mantra/affirmation for me. This short piece contains everything I have been striving for in workshops, classes, and seminars for many years. And yet it comes down to one simple point of attention. When I am feeling pressure, lack, tension, or neediness, my solution is not even to become one with the Source but just to know that I am already one with it.

When I can keep this in mind, life suddenly gets a lot simpler, and easier, too. It’s particularly relevant to the practice of tithing, where we are saying thank you to the Source that provides us with our sustenance on this level. Tithing is acknowledging to all our “selves” that God comes first in our lives.

I have been tithing for many years, but I can’t say that I am peaceful or poised every day. And yet I can be. I am the only one in the way. It’s a huge relief to have the words of the above quote with me as I navigate these times in which we live.

I have been talking to a few people recently who have been blessed to come into a lot of money, yet they have resisted tithing. The reasons vary: some want to have control of where the money goes, some are afraid of being poor, all of them just don’t get that tithing is simply being grateful by giving unconditionally and joyfully. In a word—thanks!

Perhaps I need to send them this quote from J-R:

Many people have the attitude toward money of, “I worked for it, I earned it, it’s mine.” And yet if we say, “With this that has been given to me, I will give back 10 percent,” we take away the “my” approach. In the giving back to the Spirit Source of what we earn, the attitude of “Me, what about me?” goes away. Now, that really goes against the teachings of the negative power.

And it’s good to hear this reminder from J-R about the big picture of abundance:

Tithing educates the lower consciousness, and seeding is cooperation with the higher consciousness. Tithe for the lower self, seed for the high self, and share it out through the conscious self. Be the source of extreme abundance and overflow for everybody around you. In this way, you come back and reconnect your power with the glory of God.

On one MSIA staff trip to Australia, I visited an old friend (and I really mean old—96 years). The outpouring of gratitude I received from her and from her family greatly outweighed the small effort I had made to be with her. The experience made me realize that unconditional giving and unconditional loving are a superpower.

I felt like I was watching everything going on around me through a window. Usually I could see out of it but every once in a while I was forced to look at my own reflection, which was less fun.

Tavi Gevinson (14 year-old American Fashion Blogger)

A story is told about the American tourist who came to visit the Chafetz Chayim, one of the great sages of Eastern Europe. The tourist surveyed the rabbi’s room and saw only a table, a chair, a closet, a bookcase, and a bed.

“Where are your possessions?” he asked.

“Where are your possessions?” replied the rabbi.

“What do you mean, ‘Where are my possessions?’” asked the tourist. “I
am just a visitor here.”

“So am I,” said the Chafetz Chayim.

Jack Riemer

My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.

Joseph Brotherton (1783-1857)

This is from Dave Ramsey, a wealthy, bestselling financial author with a Christian bent, who has his own nationally broadcast radio show on personal finances. I find him to be right on with his advice on getting out of debt and on tithing.

Q: Is it acceptable to pause tithing in tough financial times?

DAVE RAMSEY: The Bible does not mention anything about “pausing” tithing.

Tithing was created for our benefit. It is to teach us how to keep God first in our lives and how to be unselfish people. Unselfish people make better husbands, wives, friends, relatives, employees and employers. God is trying to teach us how to prosper over time.

If you cannot live off 90% of your income, then you cannot live off 100%. It does not require a miracle for you to get through the month. I think that if you sit down and look at your budget, you will see that you can make it while giving at least 10%. If you tithe, do it out of love for God, not guilt.

I do not beat people up for not tithing because Jesus certainly did not, but let me encourage you to keep tithing. God doesn’t love you more just because you tithe more than the person sitting next to you. It’s not a salvation issue, either. It makes us focus on something other than ourselves.

I wouldn’t stop or reduce my tithe if I were in your situation. When I hit bottom 20 years ago, I tithed all the way into bankruptcy court and all the way out.


There is no greater mystery than this, that we keep seeking reality though in fact we are reality. We think that there is something hiding our reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained. How ridiculous! A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts. That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.

Ramana Maharshi


I WISH YOU GRACE

As we conclude this three-volume series on the spiritual principles of abundance and prosperity, I hope you will take time to revisit and contemplate the depth of the quotes from John-Roger and other wise teachers and commentators contained within these volumes.

Let’s end on a note of gratitude from a reader and with two quotes from John-Roger to remind us, once again, that what we hold in our minds and imagination is of the utmost importance to the quality of our lives. And that
we can walk through life in grace.

I just wanted to say thank you so much for writing these God Is My Partner pieces. I am currently a full-time student and single Mom. My income is $694 a month and I still tithe ten percent of that each month. I have found that there are many things I can read or hear a million times and still not grasp on a deeper level. The practice of seeding and tithing is one of those concepts for me. It’s still a concept that I cannot explain to someone who asks me, “Why do you tithe when you only have such a little bit?”

I know that I tithe because it is an exercise in placing my trust in my creator. Tithing is the physical action that I do on a consistent basis to demonstrate this trust. And, you know, no matter how grim some months seem, I am always taken care of above and beyond what I anticipate. It’s incredible how that works.

I was just reading how tithing is how we put God first in our lives. For me, also, it’s a reminder that if I don’t put God first, there’s not a whole lot left on this physical level. If I place my trust in money, I might go bankrupt. If I put my trust in human beings, I might end up disappointed and hurt. If I put my trust in my house, a tornado might take it. If I put my trust in my car, it might break down. But if I put my trust in God, there are never any negative consequences. I am always loved and cared for. My focus and my intention remain inward rather than outward, and I am nurtured on more levels than I can imagine. I remain clear. And I grow deeper in my trust in God each month that I tithe.

Sarah Young

In your imagination, you can visualize what you wish to take place. Be very specific and precise. Spirit is efficient. The pictures you hold in your mind are important because they manifest as thoughts that have their own energy.

So be responsible to them—because you are, whether you like it or not. One important way to be responsible about what you imagine is to ask that it come forward only if it is for the highest good of all concerned.

From Wealth and Higher Consciousness by John-Roger, D.S.S.

When you receive grace it becomes an attitude, a way of being, that you maintain. One way to do this is to hold a picture in your mind that you want more of, one that uplifts you. Once the attitude is formed, it is then practiced as a conscious behavior. The body then takes over and incorporates it as a habit.

You then start to walk through life not even knowing that you’re grace filled and joyful until people notice and bring it to your attention. You’re joyful because you are not preoccupied with the things that used to bother you. They’re still there, but they don’t bother you because you don’t focus on them.

From The Rest of Your Life by John-Roger, D.S.S., with Paul Kaye

AFTERWORD

John-Roger’s book God Is Your Partner laid out the spiritual principles of abundance and prosperity in a very clear and practical way. Living the Spiritual Principles of Abundance and Prosperity is inspired by that foundation.

In April 2009, I started an e-newsletter called God Is My Partner to encourage people to practice the abundance tools John-Roger has so lovingly laid out for us. The response was more than I could have hoped for, and many people requested that the pieces be put in a book. This first volume is a response to that and contains the first 25 newsletters.

If you are new to John-Roger’s work, two terms that you will see throughout this book and the subsequent volumes are tithing and seeding. These are two of the fundamental practices for living an abundant life. Tithing is the spiritual practice of giving 10 percent of one’s increase to God by giving it to the Source of one’s spiritual teachings. Seeding is a form of prayer to God for something that one wants to manifest in the world. It is done by placing a “seed” with (giving an amount of money to) the Source of one’s spiritual teachings.

God Is Your Partner has step-by-step directions for both tithing and seeding and describes how to create financial abundance and other things you want by working with God. The book also explains the spiritual basis of tithing and seeding and why it is very hard for people to shake you loose from your spirit if you have done both tithing and seeding.

God is Your Partner can be obtained free of charge by;

1. Downloading a pdf at www.godismypartner.org/goodies_get.php

2. Ordering online at www.msia.org/store

3. Writing to MSIA at 3500 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90018


If you would like to receive the bi-weekly e-newsletter GOD IS MY PARTNER you can sign up for free at: www.godismypartner.org/subscribe


APPENDIX: SOURCES FOR THE QUOTES

Here are the sources for the quotes that are not cited in the text.

WHAT TO TRUST? page 1
Peggy Noonan is a journalist, political commentator, and former presidential
speechwriter. The quote is from her book What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era.

RECONNECTING TO YOUR NATURAL RHYTHM, page 5
Sogyal Rinpoche is a world-renowned Tibetan Buddhist teacher and author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

THE POWER OF PRESENCE, page 9
Rabbi David Wolpe writing in his blog “Off the Pulpit—Short weekly thoughts by Rabbi Wolpe.”

EXERCISING OUR DIVINITY, page 13
“The Guest House” is a poem by Jalal al-Din Rumi translated by Coleman Barks
and can be found in the book The Essential Rumi.

The piece by David Albert was found on www.CharityFocus.org. Josh Stieber and Conor Curran are two Iraq war veterans who discovered that love conquers fear and hate. They began to spread this message by journeying across the country sharing their stories on the “Contagious Love Experiment” (www.contagiousloveexperiment.wordpress.com).

NO COMPLAINT WHATSOEVER, page 21
The Jeffrey Zaslow piece was from the article “From Attitude to Gratitude: This Is No Time for Complaints” written in The Wall Street Journal on March 4, 2009.

THE MANY BLESSINGS OF GRACE, page 25
The quote from Matthieu Ricard is from his article “This is Your Brain on Bliss” that he wrote in the Winter 2009 issue of YES! Magazine.

Mitra Somerville is a teacher at the Integral Yoga Institute of New York in
Manhattan. The quote comes from Yoga Journal July/August 2005 edition.

THE PROCESS OF CREATION, page 29
Miguel Helft article was entitled “In New Case, iPad Starts in an Instant” and
appeared in The New York Times on March 11, 2011.

James Grover Thurber (1894-1961) was an American humorist and cartoonist. The quote comes from “The Book-End,” Columbus Dispatch (1923) Collecting
Himself (1989).

The quote from Carlos Castaneda is from his book The Art of Dreaming and is
being said by his teacher, the sorcerer Don Juan.

“ALL I’VE GOT IS YOURS”, page 41
God is Your Partner can be downloaded free in pdf format at www.msia.org/store.

CRYSTAL CLEAR CONSCIOUSNESS, page 45
John C. Lilly (1915-2001) was an American physician, neuroscientist,
psychoanalyst, philosopher, and writer. He was a researcher of the nature of
consciousness and is well known for his explorations into dolphin communication.

Amit Goswami, Ph.D., is Professor of Physics, University of Oregon and author of several books including the Self Aware Universe and Physics of the Soul.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED IS ALREADY INSIDE OF YOU, page 49
Albert Camus quote is as translated in Lyrical and Critical Essays (1968), p. 169.

THE FREEDOM TO FOCUS ON THE SPIRIT, page 65
The quote from William James (1842-1910) is from The Varieties of Religious
Experience.

YOU ARE A PORTABLE GIFT, page 77
“What’s a Gift?” was from Seth Godin’s blog at sethgodin.typepad.com and was posted on June 19, 2010.

WINNING IN YOUR FANTASY, page 81
Akaya Windwood’s article was written in Yes! Magazine (www.yesmagazine.org) on June 15, 2010.

ENDURING TO THE END, page 85
Jim Wang’s blog post was the third of his series of blog posts entitled “7 Deadly Sins of Personal Finance” and was posted on August 18, 2008.

THE POWER OF LIMITS, page 89
The Rumi quote was found in Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch.

The Seth Godin piece was entitled Problems and Constraints and was posted on his blog at www.sethgodin.typepad.com on November 8, 2010.

The quote by Igor Stravinsky was from his book Poetics of Music in the Form of Lessons.

NO TENSION, NO LACK, NO PRESSURE, page 95
The J-R quotes on page 93 are from God Is Your Partner.

Tavi Gevinson blogs at www.thestylerookie.com.

The story of the Chafetz Chayim was by Jack Riemer from an article entitled “Jewish Wisdom for the End of Life” written in Reform Judaism magazine, Summer 1997 issue.

Joseph Brotherton was a British politician and Christian minister.


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“ASSUME THAT YOU ARE HEALTHY,
ASSUME THAT YOU ARE AWAKE,
ASSUME THAT YOU ARE DIVINE,
ASSUME THAT YOU HAVE ABUNDANCE.
GOD DIDN’T PUT US ON EARTH AND SAY “BEG”.
HE SAID, “ALL I’VE GOT IS YOURS”.

JOHN-ROGER, D.S.S.



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