We now live in a different world than we lived in a few years ago. The playing field of life has changed. All change, as we know, is preceded by destruction of the old ways. The butterfly was a caterpillar. The caterpillar had to be destroyed to develop into a butterfly. All change is preceded by destruction of the old ways. We want to hold on to the old ways with our dear life because that is the only security we know.
The old ways do not work anymore.
Most people live a traumatized life and the worst part is that they do not realize that they are living a traumatic life. To describe it at best, they say they are living under stressful conditions. They are stressed out. They are stressed out more than ever before.
The most interesting fact is that they are wealthier than ever before. There are more jobs available than before and people have more opportunities to build enterprises and businesses with less capital than before. Why are they stressed out then? That is the question. Stress and tension have lowered their self esteem.
We live our life today at “want” speed. Our mind cannot comprehend the “want” speed. Our mind can do anything that we train it to do. As such, we must take charge of our mind and then only we will be able to train the mind to obey us and carry out our commands. The mind cannot hold the thought that it has never experienced before, nor has any memory of it. The mind wants to take over our life.
How do we take charge of our life and make the mind obey us?
The mind is only the operating system, consciousness is life. Success is not instant coffee. We just pour hot water and voila-we are successful! Neither is it a hard work, fraught with dangers and anguish. Success is a discipline. We have to discipline the mind to obey us, which is our consciousness. Success is not instant coffee. It needs to be roasted, grounded, and then brewed. Only then we will get a great cup of success.
Success is a system.
This system is distilled and laid out in the book. We know our thoughts create. We always carry a thought and these thoughts are molding and shaping our life now. The thoughts that we are thinking now are the thoughts we want to think? Can we get rid of those thoughts? Sometimes thoughts are like ghosts, they haunt us. We seem to get attached to them.
All the formulas in the world in terms of thinking and getting what we want become ineffective. Let me repeat this: all the formulas in the world in terms of thinking and getting what we want become ineffective because we cannot think the thoughts we want to think.
We cannot force irrelevant thoughts out of our mind. We cannot bring a thought that we want to bring into our mind unless we have consent or an agreement with our mind. As great King Solomon puts it:
"We are what our thought is".
Success is being able to think the thoughts you want to think. Success is not how much money you have. You will have all the money in the world if you know how to think the thoughts that you want to think.
It takes practice to learn how to think the thoughts we want to think, regardless of our circumstances. The topic of this chapter is thinking outside the box and creating a new vision.
Why do we need to think out of the box to be successful? How can we think out of the box, think the thoughts we want to think, and not look upon this out of the box thought as a fantasy?
What is the difference between a fantasy and a vision?
These are important questions we have to ask ourselves. These are the questions people ask over and over again and answers to these questions are crucial for our happiness and our success. We know, all freedom is in thought. The Masters of antiquity knew that all limitations are in thought and all freedom is in thought.
Regardless of whether these Masters were from the east or the west, they were in full agreement that one has to develop the power to think freely. Only then one can vision freely.
Where does your thought come from?
We know that we live in a thought world. We live in the world that we have created with our thoughts. We can blame our circumstances and our conditions that are holding us back from being successful or getting what we want but it all boils down to how we think and where our thoughts are being generated from.
We cannot be greater that our thought. We are what our thought is.
The ancient Masters understood the plot of the struggling individual and realized that the individual cannot be greater than his or her thought. They knew that blaming our shortcomings and our inadequacies and play the game of "poor me” would not help us in thinking the thoughts we want to think. It would not make us happier, healthier, or wealthier.
To help the struggling world, the ancient Masters created systems and practices for the individual to take control of the thinking process and as a result, to take control of their world.
These systems and practices are down to earth and easy to practice. They are also imperishable, which means they are timeless. They are as effective today as they have been thousands of years ago.
No amount of theory can change your world, though theory is necessary but without application of theory into practice it is not worth anything to anyone. If you do not take the steps to learn how to think out of the box, you will not be able to
change your world.
This is the reason why the “Ancient Secrets of Success for Today's World”
book provides theory and practice as taught by the Ancients thousands of years ago. These practices and principles have withstood the tests and scrutiny of time and have prevailed. That is crucial.
There is no theory for success. Theory is the prelude to practice.
One must practice being successful. Now, let's go to thinking out of the box. Opinions vary in terms of what thinking out of the box really means. Some think out of the box thinking means thinking unconventionally or not looking into the past to create the future.
What is this box that we feel boxed in?
The mind loves this box, consciousness feels boxed in. A box has three dimensions - length, width, and height. Consciousness has no dimension or space. The box that we think out of today has three dimensions too. This is the mental box - past, present, and future. This is the dimension of the box that we think out of.
For example, when we say “If I do this, I will have that”, then you are looking into the future. The future always has an element of uncertainty in our mind.
Our mind is space and time bound.
Our consciousness is not time and space bound. When we are conscious of a thing, a circumstance, a condition we do not project it into the future, we are in it. That is a vision.
For example, when we have a worry, the worry is a condition that we expect in the future but there seems to be very little uncertainty about it. That condition may happen five years from today or six months from today. We experience it now. It is like an eternity of pain.
What is eternity?
Eternity or infinity is not a very long time or a line. Endless, it has no beginning and no ending like the vision of worry is eternal. Our consciousness is thinking and feeling that it is eternal. It has no beginning and no ending. So, when we are thinking out of the box, we are thinking within the parameters of past, present, and future.
A worry is a vision, which we have accepted and it does not depend upon past, present, or future. It is what we are thinking and feeling at that moment.
Thinking and feeling cannot be done in the future.
Our thought is processed through our mind. The mind travels in time and time is in past, present, and future. It is here that the great conflict takes place. Here is the abyss between the mind and consciousness. The mind is trapped in space and time. Consciousness is transcendent of time and space. Closing this gap between the mind that is trapped in time and space and consciousness being transcended of time and space is attainment. It is success.
Thinking and feeling has no past, no present, and no future.
Just like a thought of worry of tomorrow has already been experienced in eternity. That is why the great Master, Jesus of Nazareth told his disciples "Carry no thoughts for tomorrow", which means do not get trapped in the box of time and space. Time and space is the cause of anxiety, which means carry no anxious thoughts.
The Masters thousands of years ago taught us "Consciousness creates" and today the science tells us in Copenhagen interpretation "Consciousness creates reality". Does our mind want to believe that?
The great Master, Jesus of Nazareth, said to his disciples "What things so ever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them".
Science today says "The Universe is not local", which means there is no space and time, past, present, and future.
To illustrate the teaching of the Master and a scientist a good example would be to see an egg. Let’s take the egg. The bird is in the egg. If we crack the egg, we will only see the cracked shell, the white of the egg, and the yolk and it is kind of messy.
Our mind will not want to believe that in the cracked shell, the messy yolk, and the egg white was a bird. The colorful feathers, the claws of the bird, the liver, the kidney, the heart, the lungs, and the enormous, intricate wiring system called the nervous system.
It needed nothing but incubation and hatching. It must be allowed to hatch.
The bird was there beyond time and space. It needed to be allowed to manifest. First comes creation, which is the vision, the egg. Then comes manifestation of the vision, which our five senses can relate to. We can smell it, we can touch it, we can hear it, we can taste it, we can see it.
We did not need to do anything to have the bird to come out alive except for incubating it. We needed to wait with understanding, so we can enjoy the manifestation of the bird.
The whole bird was in the egg. Our whole vision of what we want is in the egg in this example.
Manifestation is in the vision.
The mind does not want to believe it. We have to convince our mind that there is a bird in the egg. That is training the mind to think out of the box.
The egg is the vision and the bird is the manifestation. That is what the four proclamations are all about- to train the mind that manifestation is in the vision.
Always remember, imagination is the power of the Universe. Our vision comes out of imagination. So, we are going to do a little bit of imagination right now because if we cannot imagine, then we cannot create.
There is no one on this planet Earth, no single human being who cannot imagine. Someone may say "I cannot imagine". Of course, they cannot imagine. They are not in control of their imagination. They cannot imagine what they want to imagine.
If you can think, then you can imagine.
Imagination shapes our vision. Imagination is never in the past, present, or future. There are two kinds of imagination:
o The first kind comes from intuition.
o The second is generated from conditions.
Regardless of which source imagination is generated from, both kinds of imagination are equally potent and if it is held and made into a vision, it will manifest. The vision does not discriminate the source of imagination.
Now, let’s look at the second kind of imagination, imagination coming from condition- that is, generated from condition. It is only an effect of past, present, and future. That is being boxed in, that is thinking in the box. Imagination coming from condition is an effect of past, present, and future. This means such imagination comes from the mind. It is relative to what is happening in our life and we draw inferences from our conditions. Then we feel we can have this or we cannot have that. This, in turn, becomes our vision. Our mind is very comfortable with that.
Whether we like it or not, we are creating more of what is happening in our life, or fixing something that may happen because of the conditions around us. This is thinking from the box. The egg is the vision of the bird waiting to incubate and hatch. The bird is already there. Our mind cannot believe it. Our consciousness knows it. Our consciousness has to operate through the mind to live in time and space.
The mind is the operating system of our life and as such, we need to convince the mind to accept it or reject it.
Now, that is where we are trapped in and when the mind does not allow us to think the thoughts we want to think, we are boxed in the time and space bound mind. It is very uncomfortable and because we have been living that way, we have gotten used to it. The other source of imagination comes from the absolute - our intuition, our inner tutor, the Universe, which is the same as the universal consciousness, as we know from all cultures and all traditions. Hermes says “As the Macrocosm, so the Microcosm and as the Microcosm, so the Macrocosm” or “As the Universe, so the Individual and as the Individual, so the Universe”, our inner tutor.
The Universe, which is the same as the inner visual consciousness is the source of our intuition. It is not a hunch, it is our infinitude aching to come out. If we do not use it, that is not the intent. It is urging us to live like we have never lived before- that is living out of the box.
The mind usually corrupts imagination, which comes out of intuition and makes it into a fantasy, so they say we are fantasizing. Some day in the past someone fantasized about the internet. Today, we live in the internet. Some day in the past somebody fantasized about submarine and science fiction writers wrote about it.
Today, we have little submarine towns as a reality. If our imagination can be held by us, by our trained mind, it can manifest what we are holding as a vision. The reason we cannot think out of the box is because we do not believe that we create out of no-thing. There is a chapter in the book titled “The Everyday Magic of Creating from No-Thing”, which is worth reading over and over again.
We need things, we need conditions, the mind needs it. If I have this or that thing, I can have what I want. That is normal. That is thinking in the box and there is nothing wrong with it but that is thinking in the box. The teachings of the Masters are there to convince us to think out of the box, imagine, and then vision from the absolute, from our true being.
Imagine, just imagine.
Have you ever thought that you could sit down and spend fifteen minutes to go on imaginary journey? That is a good practice. Consciousness is the creator and consciousness is the substance as well. We know today the word consciousness is used by scientists. Physics says consciousness creates reality.
Reality is observer created.
That means when we observe the world around us we observe our vision. The Universe is non local. That means there is no space and time, no locality. Everything is made out of no-thing and the Universe is non local. This boggles our mind. Our mind cannot handle it and we say this is crazy. Of course, this is crazy!
How was this Universe created? Who can say?
The mind cannot conceive. How can the lesser conceive the greater? What is matter? What is the matter with the matter?
Now the scientists are saying we have lost our grip on our reality. That means the vision that we hold is ours already, whatever things we desire.
When you plain ask, believe you have already got it, then you will have it. The speed of manifestation is always in direct proportion of your belief level.
There is no magic trick to it. If we cannot believe it, we cannot have it. We can say it as many times as we like. If we say sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, does our mouth become sweet? Our mouth will become tired.
If we think and believe in our thought, then only manifestation will come and it is immediate. The physics says unmediated. That means no obstructions, no mediation. Unmediated, that is not mitigated in any way and it is immediate.
If you do not believe it, look at the worries. Our worries are visioned. That is, they come to us unmediated, unmitigated, and immediately. Worry is the worst disease of the mankind. It destroys us because worry is a vision of what we fear and we experience it. It is generated by our mind and we want to use the mind to get rid of it. Now, that is impossibility, so most people go and take mind altering drugs.
The mind is the progenitor of worry.
That is why we have to come to consciousness. That is why the meditation on the proclamations trains the mind to believe the truth. It also trains the mind where it