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By Cathy Eck

Other Worldly Channels

I bet you thought I was going to write about turning off your TV.  Hell no!  People put their creative ideas on television; and you  and I have complete freedom to watch them or turn them off.  I am an awful follower, but I’m a wonderfully appreciative audience member.  I love entertainment.

The truth is that I had to write a post about Channels (or Mediums) because I’ve been answering a lot of emails about them.  I’m sometimes seen as Abraham-like (a channeled being that has been popular since the 90’s) because of my use of the words “feel good” and my focus on emotions.  But we’re very different.  Abraham helps you win within the illusion; and I tell you how to get your ass out of it.  Abraham is part of the New Thought movement, which encourages the practice of changing your unwanted thoughts to positive ones; I, however, encourage letting go of the thoughts that you don’t want so you’ll reveal your naturally positive thoughts without trying.  For some of you, that’s probably enough explanation.  If you want more, read on….and on.

Let me remind you that when I write about what others teach, I’m not opposed to them personally even though I can be very blunt about what they teach.  I’m not slamming the person, but their beliefs are beliefs.  We’re all victims of the illusion; and some people do want to win in the illusion.  So those teachings are for those people.   I expose all believers equally because my readers want freedom from the illusion.  It is important that I clearly demonstrate what comes from beliefs and what is just plain old natural knowing.

I say this because people can sometimes be kind of protective of their “spiritual” teachers; they think they need them.   The last thing we need is a spiritual teacher.  I guarantee you that the one part of you that is whole and needs no cleaning up is your spirit or True Self.  Discrimination is about getting real, but it isn’t about hating someone or wanting them to stop what they do.  Unlike religion, I don’t think there are bad people.  Most teachers and preachers out there today are offering comfort in the illusion.  Comfort isn’t a bad thing; but it gets in the way and causes confusion when we want freedom from the illusion.

Readers often  wonder why I don’t treat emotions the same as the New Thought and New Age leaders.  People write to me, “I’ve been letting go with Abraham for years, but nothing is working.”  My answer is usually something like, “Well it doesn’t work because you’ve not been letting go of shit.  You’ve been choosing a better thought.”  To use my old worn out cliché, the New Thought movement was all about teaching people to put loads of whipped cream on top of a huge pile of very old manure.

Likes

There are some things that I like about the message of Abraham (and New Thought). In fact, I was an on-again, off-again Abraham listener in the 90’s because of these things.

1)  It’s a positive message, and who doesn’t love a positive message.  But positive does no good if you put it on top of negative.  You create something that looks and sounds like a True Self but isn’t a True Self because it has a subconscious that continues to attempt to create unwanted things in our life or in the lives of others.

2)  Abraham says that we have the right to “feel good.”  Living with a Catholic, I felt like I hit the lottery when I found New Thought.  Someone was validating my innermost thoughts; and that had not happened in decades.  But all I needed was to have my innermost thoughts validated.  Then I needed to start stripping off the outer layers by letting go.  Changing our thoughts doesn’t strip away; it adds more thoughts to the manure pile.

3)  Abraham spoke clearly, and s/he was articulate.  Her message was consistent.  I would often listen to Abraham during the time I was dissecting the Bible since I felt like a plumber digging in a giant sewage pit; the Bible was filled with contradictions and dichotomies.  Some of the stories were depressing.  But I had to wonder…why didn’t Jesus just choose a better thought when that little cross incident happened?

4)  New Thought gave us permission to watch our own minds.  My husband was trained that it was selfish to watch your own mind and follow thoughts that felt good or clear.  He believed that I was supposed to watch other people’s thoughts (or his thoughts) so that I said and did the right things according to their (or his) rulebook.  According to my husband, being good was about managing other people’s emotions.  This is how he was trained.  But this meant that he always followed the people with the most beliefs (or emotions) in any situation.  That rarely had a good outcome from my perspective.  I couldn’t get to win-win in his world.  Abraham gave me permission to win, but I still didn’t want my husband to lose.

5)  Abraham did give emotions some credit for being useful, even if she did erroneously label them positive or negative.  This falls into the occult view of emotions that has tricked us for thousands of years.

6)  Abraham routinely told people that they could solve their problems and could cure the incurable.  In this way, she was like Jesus.  She emphasized the “we could do it” a little more than Jesus did.  You have to like that.  She was like anti-venom in a venomous world.

I was introduced to Abraham by a friend in the earliest of days when s/he only had one tape series.  So I got to watch the phenomenon grow from the ground up.  That taught me a lot.  I got to see what people wanted and believed.  I got to watch the types of people that got results and the types that didn’t.  I got to hear the questions that people wanted answered.  I got to witness the pain that people lived through the questions they asked.  If nothing else my compassion grew by leaps and bounds.  That needed to happen.  Much like religion, I see the New Thought movement as a stage.  Unfortunately, like religion, some people get stuck in a stage, which is a little like still thinking you’re still in college when you’re fifty.

Positive Thinking

I was no stranger to the positive thinking movement.  I bought my first positive thinking book when there were only two authors on the shelf in the bookstore… Wayne Dyer and the guy who founded Amway.  I acquired a collection of books written, in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, by the richest and most successful people in the western world .  I wanted to learn how people built big businesses; and their advice was always about how they used their minds.  They all had the same theme — focus your mind on positive thoughts.

Abraham’s words sounded just like the writers of these positive thinking books.  I liked reading those old books; but I never did much of what they said for some reason.  I never felt compelled to change my mind.  I did watch my mind most of the time; and my thoughts weren’t super negative or uber positive.  I was willing to play with the hand I was dealt; it was a decent hand.

I joke that I started this collection of positive thinking books after marrying my husband.  It was like I was balancing the forces of negative Catholicism so I could keep from drowning.  I’d listen to him for an hour and then go grab a New Thought book.  The longer I was with him, the bigger the collection grew.

I later wondered if that was exactly what generated the surge of the New Thought movement.  When the pendulum swings too far one way in the illusion; it usually starts to turn and swing back in the other direction.  Esther Hicks, who channeled Abraham, mentioned many times that Jerry, her partner and husband, was a big fan and teacher of “Think and Grow Rich.”  I came to believe that Esther was channeling Jerry’s voice or this same group of voices from the books I collected.

These people were generally not traditionally religious although they did believe in a creator and seemed to find Jesus to be a cool dude.  They were often considered enemies of the Catholic church because they were agnostic.  You can see a great example if you read anything by Science of Mind religion founder Ernest Holmes; you’ll find the same words and tone as Abraham and these other wealthy authors.  Look at the founders of Unity Church, and again you find the same tone.  It was a way of thinking that was floating in the airwaves when Jerry was in his youth.  America was building big industries; and it took big minds to do that.  The big mind notion then drove the beginning of New Thought religions.  This way you could be good and rich by being positive.  The American Dream is about this sort of thinking.  These were people who owned the masculine role; and boy could they ever project on to the feminine role.  They were very comfortable owning sweat shops with underpaid and overworked laborers while they got ultra rich.  In their mind, they were providing jobs and security.  It was a new and improved form of slavery — a socially acceptable form.

The positive thinking view of life was all shared within secret brotherhoods until these books started emerging.  I think some of the players started to have a tinge of guilt, probably just before they died.  They were winning everything.  This mode of thinking grew and grew and became less and less of a secret (although this was exactly the same philosophy that was much, much later the focus of the popular movie, “The Secret.”)  Channels and psychics, who are obviously sensitive telepathic people, started to tune in to these thought forms.  They thought they were talking to spirits because they’d never heard others speak like this.  But just like the prophets who heard the man-invented voice of the old false God in the sky, they were simply repeating history by picking up human thought forms that weren’t widely known.  The secret came out; but by that time, the elite had a major lead in the game.

Abraham got my pendulum moving; and for that I’m grateful.  But I would have to do a lot of cleanup from that New Thought period of my life because I stayed around too long for my own good.  I kept doubting what I was finding in my research (inner and outer) because it wasn’t as positive.  It seemed that no one wanted to find their causal beliefs or feel their emotions when they could just whip a happy thought on it.  I was like Satan to the New Thought movement.  Abraham was like Santa.  (See Santa or Satan.)

I now realize that sometimes we need to take a few steps back in order to take a giant leap forward.  So if you’ve got Abraham, Bashar, Wayne Dyer, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra or some other channel, guru, or New Age teacher on the brain, don’t jump out your high-rise window yet.  It’s fixable.

Flaws in the New Thought Theories

Now before I describe the major flaws that I’ve found in the New Thought movement, remember that these are flaws if you want freedom.  If you want comfort in the illusion, these are not flaws.  They will deliver comfort and help you to win in the illusion.

1)  Law of attraction is described as like attracts like.  In the physical world, attraction is magnetic.  Opposites attract in magnetism.  Our words give us away.  Romance or chemistry is magnetism.  Marketing is magnetism.  Magnetism is the attraction of opposites, not things that are the same.  Everything is driven to return to wholeness in the illusion.  We are looking to be completed.

From the time that we’re born, we’re taught to be halves and see with two eyes (instead of the single-eyed vision that we had at birth).  It’s conditioning that causes us to accept the illusion as the truth.  Half truths or beliefs generate emotion, and emotion is magnetic.  Try to get away from those people you hate.  Until you let go of the beliefs you hold that pull them into your world, you can’t.  They will keep showing up.

Put two of same magnetic poles together; and you get repulsion, not attraction.  If you want to sell something, you need the opposite, a buyer.  What makes letting go so difficult at times is magnetism.  We can feel the pull of the magnetic poles as we try to break away.  I often feel as if I’m pulling people apart when I mentor them.  I can feel the strength of the magnetic pull they have with others especially if someone was trying to possess them (which very often is their past New Thought teachers or gurus).

Now to be clear and to protect my gay friends, the issue with the religious evangelists is that they are INCORRECTLY looking at life from the physical level.  The Bible was written by people who saw life from the mental perspective.  The Bible makes no sense when you view it from the physical level.  The physical to the initiates was simply the affect of the mental. Magnetism happens at the mental level.  Two men sleeping together meant that two leaders, who both wanted to claim the masculine role in the illusion (where everyone is asleep), would end up in a battle for power — a war.  It wasn’t a good thing.  So please don’t ever let these clueless sleeping people get to you.

Abraham was standing in a masculine role, as are all other New Thought teachers.  Our eyesight gets clouded when we own the false masculine role — we gets motes in it (says Jesus).   When we stand in the true masculine role, we will naturally let go of the flaws we see in those who play our feminine role, and all will be just dandy.  The only thing that’s truly and completely win-win for everyone on this planet is for the false masculine role to disappear.   We can’t all become false masculines and have our way; our polar earth demands that a feminine exist.

2)  People that listened to Abraham were over the top.  I went to a couple of Abraham events.  I wanted to kill everyone I met.  Well, maybe not really kill them…let’s just say I wasn’t feeling the love.  It felt like everyone was competing to be the most positive, the most like Abraham.  People were manifesting just to manifest.  Success was measured by the quality and quantity of manifestations.  They analyzed everything to death, and constantly proclaimed their high mark on the emotional scale when it looked pretty clear that their thermometer wasn’t as hot, hot, hot as they thought, thought, thought.  They didn’t discriminate at all.  If Abraham said it, it was right and true.  It was just like being with a bunch of Bible Thumpers.  There was no going with the flow even though they talked about going downstream all the time.   It did feel selfish to me; and I wondered why because I feel we should have what we want in life.  But I have learned that many of the desires I had earlier in life were false.  I’ve come to see selfishness as wanting something that really doesn’t belong to me.  I’ve learned to let go of such false desires.  When we let go, we do get what we want; but we also want what we get.  Life becomes a feedback loop, not a competition.

3)  The name sucks.  Abraham is the most gullible Bible character of all.  He so believed the Lord God that he was willing to kill his own son.  Pleasssseee!  Do I want to follow that?

4)  “Birds of a feather flock together” in the illusion.  They stick together to defend their beliefs.  Suddenly, positive people all had to stick together; the light worker was born.  They really believed there were dark workers that they had to defeat.  They could not see this was exactly the same as the good and evil of the religious illusion.

5)  What Abraham teaches causes projection.  I became afraid of my Abraham friends because they became expert projectors.  They blamed those that they viewed as negative for their problems, not realizing they were the source of that negativity.  This is the masculine role pretending to be feminine; and nothing will make a bigger mess of relationships than that.  The masculine false male divides thought.  It identifies with the side it likes (often the positive side) and then projects the other side out.  If you won’t take its projection, it needs to niggle you down so that you will take it.  It uses fear, guilt, shame, and blame!  Again, just like religion.

Let’s say that we have always believed in poverty, and then we keep putting that whipped cream of “I am rich,” affirmation on top of our belief in poverty, where does the belief in poverty go?  We didn’t let it go because we didn’t see it as false.  When we spray that whipped cream all over the poverty river of sewage, we eventually use a technique that I first saw my dad use as a child.  It horrified me (although nearly everyone does it in the false masculine role if you pay attention).  He excluded himself from the problems he believed in.  Doctors exclude themselves from disease so they aren’t affected by working in a house of germs that they believe are harmful.  Christians exclude themselves from hell by being saved.  If we say, “I am rich” enough, our mind thinks it has excluded us from poverty.   It has decided who should be poor; and it isn’t us.  It uses judgment, not discrimination.  So our attention is drawn to poverty elsewhere, which we will then try to fix.  It doesn’t mean that we’re causing the poverty we see, but we do contribute to pinning people in their unwanted role, making it harder for them to get free.  We’ve all felt the difficulty of getting out of the feminine role; this is why.

When people become evangelists about anything; they’re projecting.  This is a warning to not become a letting go evangelist.  Just do it because it works.  Share it; but don’t shove it.

Occasionally, a belief looks completely stupid, and we do let go without realizing it.  We’ve all done that — none of us believe every belief out there.  But Abraham didn’t work from true and false, and thus s/he never said problems weren’t real or didn’t exist.  There was virtually no letting go happening.  Changing thoughts doesn’t help anyone because we might be able to exclude ourselves for awhile, but eventually that exclusion will wear out — like when we get older (educational exclusions) or when we move into a feminine role.

This whole New Thought movement was about drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Fuck my unconscious mind.  I can’t control it.  So I’ll micromanage my conscious mind.”  But you see, you can’t do that.  It’s insane.  Why are you saying a positive thought if you don’t have a negative one you want to leap over?  Why do you want something and have to will it into fruition?  Every single time you say that positive affirmation that negative is growing in equal measure.  That’s why the battle of good and evil never seems to end.  Again this works for people in masculine roles because they see the negative outside of them.  They’ve got feminine to project on.  But for those of us little people, that negative grows until one day it fucking explodes like that dead beached whale that got filled with explosive gas because no one disposed of it, and you’re now covered in whale guts.

Of course, like everything in the illusion, positive thinking just created more problems.  So it gave rise to the love your shadow movement.  Or people transmuted the energy by tapping it away.  Or we bought a CD that balanced our brain.  If we just got rid of half truths, our brain would be balanced naturally.  Unbalanced brains aren’t normal.  They are the result of unbalanced thinking.  If we just let go, our energy would vibrate just fine.  If we let go, we wouldn’t be projecting an ugly shadow.  Fixing the EFFECT is fixing NOTHING.  Letting go fixes everything including our wallet, because all those problems and fixes cost a lot of money.

I suspect I put most of the negativity I generated into my body.  I was so determined not to project on others that I would have died first.  I made myself really sick.  But I wasn’t a victim; and I knew that.  I got myself into this mess; I had to get myself out.  After all, my mother always told me, “You made your fucking bed, go lie in it.”  I got my potty mouth from her.

I still occasionally find some beliefs and emotions from hanging out with that New Thought crowd and my positive, good husband.  When people purposely choose one-sided thinking; they always project the other side outside of their mind on to someone else.   This made letting go so attractive to me once I realized that it eliminated projection.  My willingness to go into the pain rose exponentially.  I didn’t want to project on others; and I was very sick of being projected on.  I find many of my readers are this way as well.

6)  Oddly, I listened to many Abraham tapes, but I never had my heart in the thinking she recommended.  I felt phony and dirty.  I felt like I was lying.  It didn’t feel good to be ultra positive.  Why not?  I knew there was something underneath the positive thoughts I generated.  I wanted to find the causal thoughts that were creating my fucked up life.  Unlike my positive friends, Godzilla was in my living room; and I knew that covering my eyes wouldn’t help.

It wasn’t until I grabbed the masculine role myself that I could see that the negative we suppress shows up outside of us.  Our subconscious isn’t really a mystery at all.  A true masculine leader sees their projection and let’s go of their own beliefs to free their feminine.  They free others or at least give them the right to be free.  The false masculine leaders and experts project their unwanted thoughts and beliefs on to others, and then they send them a bill.

7)  New Thought teachings slowly made people afraid of their negative thoughts, which gave negativity more power.   Facing our emotions is hard when we’ve learned to be afraid of our negative thoughts.  This is where I have the issue with Abraham’s labeling of emotions.  If you sit and watch your emotions; they all feel the same.  They’re a nervous agitation in our body that signifies that we’re thinking something that doesn’t get us where we want to go — we’re thinking a belief, not the truth.  We’re losing freedom, not gaining it.  Emotions are not those beautiful calm feelings of joy or peace.  No one wants more emotions if they’re honest.  We attach  false labels to emotions based on what we’re thinking about, which is the cause, and we make letting go nearly impossible.  All we need to do is ditch the label, see the cause, and let it go.  If we’re labeling, we aren’t letting go.

8)  Many people challenged Abraham on the word “want.”  S/he always said, “Are you knowing what you are wanting?”  This is a great example of level confusion.  In the illusion our minds are literal.  If you want something, you do have a belief underneath the want because you don’t yet have it.  But she was always clever at handling that comment.  She turned it into vibration and said the word didn’t matter.  That could be true if we were our True Self.  Our True Self can use words, but it is really more intention centered.  Our True Self is very visually oriented as well; it likes pictures.  But we are trained from birth through religion and education that words DO matter — labels must be precise.  Think about it.  She says that words don’t matter, but labeling your emotion helps you figure out your vibration?????

9) Vibration measuring isn’t practical.  It’s just like telling me God is in the clouds.  You can’t prove someone’s vibration.  Fake smiles don’t look like a high vibration to me.  They look like someone pretending to be a high vibration.  If people have to fake it; then they aren’t it.  We get out of this illusory mess by being real and honest.

This brings me to my biggest beef with the New Thought movement and the corresponding energy workers.  It isn’t practical or kind to tell someone to raise their vibration.  I started sharing what I do because I noticed that people in feminine roles couldn’t just choose a happy thought.  They were stuck underneath someone’s rules in a feminine role.  Yes, smiley face person, you go tell a child who hasn’t eaten in a week to just think a happy thought.  Yes, do that after you roll up your hot yoga mat and check out your order at Whole Foods.  This kind of bullshit feeds the false masculine roles and causes more projection.  I don’t believe we need to care for people.  People want to care for themselves; they want to be independent.  But we have to stop projecting on them so they can care for themselves.  We have to give them a bloody chance.

10)  Abraham became a belief system, a voice, in people’s minds, an illusion unto itself that we have to let go of now if we want to get back to our True Self.  Our minds became psychologically reversed to speak positive when we didn’t really believe it just like a Christian spouts a Bible verse that he or she doesn’t even understand or follow.  It created a positive persona, not a True Self.

We have to get radically honest and witness our mind and emotions to see if we’re really thinking win-win or win-lose.  We have to stop judging our negative thoughts.  We have to trust our emotions again.  When we stop hiding and judging our negative thoughts, they’re much easier to see and let go.  Any belief or thought with an emotional component is false, even if it’s part of reality.  Thus even thoughts about things like cancer and death generate emotion…think about that!

The truth is that the the bottom of the triangle was set up a long time ago.  In the one bottom corner (see image above), we have the positive-negative thinking movement (the occult brotherhoods); and in the other corner we have religion.  Acted out, we have “Angels and Demons” or “The Da Vinci Code.”  Dan Brown’s novels are a great study guide for understanding the illusion and the long-standing battle between these opposing forces if you don’t take his reality as the truth.  If we’re in either corner, we aren’t being our Self; and we won’t be powerful for long unless we become Pope or President.

Creating using emotions was the mainstay of the occult brotherhood practices.  In this way, negative emotions became the enemy.  Emotions came to be believed to provide creative power to manifest because the elite wanted us to use the positive end of the spectrum.  Emotions weren’t designed for creating; they were designed to  reveal and expose false.  That’s it.   But if we believe they create, they will.  And then you live on a hamster wheel fearful of your mind and everyone else’s minds.  Who benefits from that?  Not you!  Let go that emotions have creative power and you’ll start sleeping more peacefully tonight.

Thought is creative; it is pure creative raw material.  Thought without any emotion would be the most powerful force in the world.  It would move mountains.  And since those thoughts would be good for all; it is right that they would be powerful.  On the other hand, thoughts that contain emotions are win-lose; and it is right that they would be powerless.  As we let go of the illusion within us, this is what we see and ultimately become.

For awhile, I was looking for missing pieces, and I listened to lots of channeled materials.  I was open to finding the truth anywhere.  But I simply learned a lot about the beliefs we accept and the lies we hold in mind as true.  I’d play the tapes I bought in the car, and my kids would laugh and laugh.  They thought it was the stupidest shit they ever heard.  It took me awhile to see their point of view.  I agree with them now completely.  It’s stupid illusory shit; and that’s why you can let it all go.  We just don’t need to be told how to be positive or truthful or spiritual.  We are that.

Here’s a tip about getting back out of the delusion of New Thought.  You have to let go of the false positive thoughts/persona you created.  Often people can’t find the negative belief until they let go of the positive mask; then they see it.  Don’t worry, the real positive is hiding underneath the false positive and negative; you didn’t lose anything.

Give Up Cathy, PLEEAASE!

Abraham sat in the background of my life for much of the twenty years that I worked on this project.  She’s still speaking I’m told.  People told me to give up; Abraham had the answer.  But I just didn’t believe that.  It was during this time that I was tearing apart the New Testament trying to prove that Jesus’s story was an initiation story — in fact, a perfect one.  My Christian friends thought that was stupid.  At least everyone in my life was unanimous.  Everyone agreed that I was stupid and wasting my time.  I should get a real job; go back to consulting and make big money again.  But I was convinced that Heaven wasn’t in the clouds; there was this other perspective of life that we could get to in this life (without dying).  I was convinced that there was a top of the triangle.  I felt certain that everyone was going the wrong damn way — both religion and New Thought — they were moth-like systems chasing the light of the fire and getting burned.  Life wasn’t meant to be hard work or hard thought.

One day quite by accident a wonderful picture came into my mind, and then it manifested shortly after.  It was effortless.  My True Self accidentally squeezed between my stupid beliefs and showed up.  I suspected this had happened to others.  So they invented the tool of visualization.  “Ah,” they thought.  “This is how you make something come into your life.  You make a picture of it, and you hold it until it manifests.”  But they took something that the True Self does perfectly, effortlessly, and without harming others, and plopped it into the illusion of opposites (good-evil, win-lose, right-wrong, dominance-submission, etc.).  It was now knowledge; and it wasn’t the same thing as the True Self’s perfection.   The apples look the same on the Tree of Life as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but they aren’t the same damn apples.

Likewise, people had a positive thought that came from their True Self one day when they were walking in the woods; and then it manifested.  In fact, they maybe only had the thought once if it really came from their True Self.  It felt powerful and wonderful and effortless.  So they tried to create the same thing in the illusion with affirmations.

Then people noticed that when they got quiet, they sometimes had a sweet loving thought that manifested. They tried to make that happen with meditation.  Maybe something will slip between the cracks of thought if I quiet my mind.

Others noticed that when they were really focused on something, they had nice thoughts and felt creative; so they taught us to get into the present moment.  You see how it all came to be.  This was what gave rise to the occult, which was the false self trying to do what the True Self does perfectly and naturally.

This is how level confusion was born.  It was how hard work was born.  It’s how we fell.  The false self can’t compete with the True Self.  And for those of us trying to escape, that’s great news.  We won’t have to worry about the illusion when we get enough of our True Self running our show.  We just have to start using our minds and emotions as they were designed.  Emotions mean that what we are currently thinking is false — that’s all folks!

I did ask Abraham a question once.  I got chosen for the hot seat.  I realized that everyone who listened to her thought other people were causing their emotions and affecting their vibration.  It seemed that everyone was blaming those negative people or all the things outside of them.  That didn’t seem right to me.  I asked, “Are our emotions in response to the thinking of others or to our own thoughts?”  I wasn’t being a smartass.  I really did just want to know because I was tearing my hair out around this topic in my research; and looking at life and people around me gave me no clues.  She looked at me in what I perceived as a not very nice way as if she kind of didn’t want to answer; and she paused.  I was surprised because I’d always thought she was perpetually sweet.  But then she said, “Emotions are always the response to our own thoughts.”  I smiled.  I liked that answer.  It had to be right; it was win-win for everyone.  She gave me the truth; and I knew it.

Then I asked her what happens to my negative thoughts.  I said I feared that I’d project them on others.   She looked at me with kindness and said, “You seem like a kind person, I doubt you’d ever do that.”  Good try.  I wasn’t complete with that one.

My experience with Abraham (and the collective New Thought characters) made me work harder to understand the initiates.  Who was I to say such things?   I’m nobody special.  I’m as normal as grass.  I don’t hold myself as an expert or authority.  I just wanted out of the rat race alive.  That’s it.  Today, if I can make it easier for others, I’m willing to do that.  No big deal.  I like doing this; it isn’t my life purpose or anything like that.

Seeing how easy it is to make something up and to deceive ourselves made me concentrate hard on my research.  Seeing how gullible people are caused me to test myself by not marketing and by keeping things free or very low cost.  Noticing how people don’t discriminate for themselves made me want to discriminate with everything I did and said so I’d not mislead anyone.   Noticing how it felt to be projected on made me never want to do that.  Seeing people create false desires made me scrutinize my own desires and intentions.  Seeing people high on excitement made me test everything I wrote emotionally.  Experiencing the New Thought movement gave me desires.  They didn’t solve them; but letting go does.

All of my experience in the New Thought movement made me realize that the ancient Greeks were right, we must, “Know Ourselves.”  And we’ll never know ourselves until we watch our own minds.  If we need a channel or psychic to tell us what we want or who we are, we’re looking outside for what we can only find inside.  Save your money and time; just let it all go.  If you stay with it, you’ll see the results in time.

I guess in a way, I’m just a big old U-Turn sign.  People look outside, find me, and I tell them to go back the other way.  No one could ever know us better than we know ourselves.  It’s a weird thing to wake up one day after taking a detour through the hell of the New Age/New Thought movements; and you realize you know who you are.  The world just looks right.  You aren’t seeking anymore; you’re just living life.  YOU ARE COMPLETE.