A Note from Neale...

Hello my wonderful friends...

I have been asked many times, how can one create what you, Neale, call "the holy experience?" 

Well, the first step is believing that it is possible for you to have it. 

Now you may think that this is an elementary step — almost a given. Yet for many people this a very difficult step because they find it hard to believe that any kind of "holy experience" can happen to them. 

1. Some believe it is impossible to have the Holy Experience because they do not believe that such an experience even exists. 
2. Others believe it is impossible to have such an experience because, while it may exist, they do not know what it is or how to access it. They believe it is understandable and accessible only to ascetics and monks and holy ones — people who have devoted their entire lives to the search for inner truth and higher realities. 
3. Finally, still others believe that while it may be accessible to regular, ordinary people, they, themselves, are not worthy. They believe this for one reason or another. Some feel that there is something specific that a person has to be, do, or have in order to enter into the Holy Experience. It is, they believe, reserved for a special class of people who, while they may be ordinary, are single-minded in their determination to know of this experience, and are clear that their particular doctrine — which tells them that there is only one way to have the Holy Experience — is absolute and correct and is to be applied without exception. 

Finally, there are those who feel that because of their own behavior in this life, they are not sufficiently "holy" to have the experience in any event. It is with these varying ideas that people approach the Holy Experience — and life itself. And ideas, of course, rule all human experience. The idea that one has about anything produces one's reality around that. And where do ideas have their birth? In how you look at things. Your perspective about a thing is what creates your idea about it. 

If your perspective is created by your Mind, it will be based on Data. If your perspective is created by your Soul, it will be based on Awareness. If your perspective is created by your Mind and your Soul, working co-jointly, it will create Wisdom. 

Perspective creates perception, perception creates belief, and belief creates experience. The experience that belief creates for you is what you call "truth." 

(For a wonderful and rich explanation of this, see When Everything Changes, Change Everything, Emnin Books, distributed by Random House.) 

Because I know this, I try very hard these days to look at everything from the perspective of my highest desire. This means not looking at things through the prism of what I expect or imagine or think realistically will happen, but rather, seeing things as I choose and desire for them to happen. 

This is not easy. I find that I have been programmed by society itself to look for the worst in everything, to anticipate the least desirable outcome, to worry about and fret about and agonize over how bad things can be, rather than how good something could turn out. 

I have had to fight this tendency toward pessimism all my life. What's funny about this is that I am at the very same time the supreme optimist. I believe that I walk in luck, that God is always with me, that everything good happens to me, and that I can emerge from any difficulty — any jam, any situation — and land on my feet. 

So these are the two sides of me. Fortunately, the positive side shows itself 80% of the time and the negative only 20% of the time — but both sides are definitely there. So I have to remember to think positively and eliminate negative thoughts from my mental diet. I've got to come from the Awareness of the Soul and not the Data of my Mind. 

More next week.