Be Thankful (Anonymous)

Be thankful that you don't already have everything you desire,
If you did, what would there be to look forward to?

Be thankful when you don't know something
For it gives you the opportunity to learn.

Be thankful for the difficult times.
During those times you grow.

Be thankful for your limitations
Because they give you opportunities for improvement.

Be thankful for each new challenge
Because it will build your strength and character.

Be thankful for your mistakes
They will teach you valuable lessons.

Be thankful when you're tired and weary
Because it means you've made a difference.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

I was sent this philosophical prose just today in an email. I felt compelled to share it here with you. Gratitude can turn a negative into a positive. Find a way to be thankful for your troubles
and they will become your blessings.

The prospering power of gratitude is also explained in great detail in my new bestselling book now on sale at www.TheSecretRevealedAtLast.com entitled The Secret Revealed - How to Use the 12 Great Laws of Success.

God Became So Bored That He Became You

I think that God, All-That-Is, the Universal Power, or whatever you would like to call the Ultimate and Infinite Creative Essence from whence all of us have come in His pre-form, pure consciousness state of being-ness and self-awareness had a peculiar problem that only God could have. Stay with me now. I know that not everyone will not be able to grasp, least of all accept want I am going to postulate here. If you disagree, just forgive me and pass me off as a little nuts. It’s okay, I can handle it. Let’s get back to my postulation. God as He existed before the universe was created was in a pure formless state of having instantly everything He wished because He was/is the All. So everything God could wish, He is already that by nature of His being All-That-Is. In essence, God was bored out of His mind in being and knowing all. So to solve His problem, he decided to willingly forget who He was/is and divide Himself infinitely in the personalities of all humankind, past, present and future and allow the fun to begin through each one of us on our individual paths of self-discovery back to our exciting true nature which is of the very stuff of God.

When we realized our true potential and special gifts and talents, we allow God to experience Himself joyously through us, and through alignment with His power and belief in the power of God-in-you, we can indeed experience the joy to be, do and have anything that we choose in this wonderful event we call life.

The way back to the experience of your God-Presence within you is in the understanding and mastery of The 12 Great Laws of the Universe.

Law #1 The Law of Goal Setting
This is the first great law which is basically the law of knowing what you want and setting clear mental and written goals. Once you have set a firm goal, you have asked or made your request to the Universe.

Law #2 The Law of Belief
The foundation of success and achievement will always be found in the principle of believing. “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.” The essence of believing is feeling, and that feeling is believing. There is great power and attractive force in the power of belief.

Law #3 The Law of Positive Expectation
Positive attitude and expectancy are one of the great keys to manifesting what you want in life. In life you truly get what you expect. If you expect the best, you will get it. If you expect success, success is yours.

Law #4 The Law of Detachment
The Law of Detachment usually goes by another name that we are more familiar with and that it Faith. Faith is the ability to not worry over the results but to know that the results are on its way.

Law #5 The Law of Attraction
The Law of Attraction is one of the most attractive laws because it appeals to the genie-in-a-bottle concept. This is the law which states simply, what you think about and focus on, you attract.

Law #6 The Law of Planning
This law tells you to start where you are and do what you can on the path to the achievement of your goals. Planning can be mental, but it is even more effective if it is written.

Law #7 The Law of Willingness to Do
The willingness to do whatever is necessary is that which lubricates the mechanics of inspired ideas.

Law #8 The Law of Immediate Action
The Universe rewards action. When you have an inspired idea, you must not procrastinate. You act on it immediately.

Law #9 The Law of Persistence
Life will give you anything that you desire if you insist on it, if you take every obstacle as a challenge in the way the person enjoys putting the pieces together of the jigsaw puzzle. It’s all a game. Truly it’s all a game. Have fun with it.

Law #10 The Law of Money
Money too comes to you based on clearly defined laws. You must know how to bless money, enjoy money, organize money, save money, invest money and give money properly to at last know true abundance.

Law #11 The Law of Gratitude
The Law of Gratitude works to put you in touch with the Creative Source that has given you all you have. You employ this great law before and especially after you have received what you have intended.

Law #12 The Law of Giving
The Law of Giving means giving to others especially in the way of helping and giving service to those less fortunate for giving completes the circle. God gives to the giver and takes from the taker.

Why You Must Have Goals

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder. I think that you would agree that if you got inside of a motor boat with no guiding rudder in a harbor, revved it up and let it go where-ever, once it took off into the open waters the chances of crashing into the rocks, capsizing or smashing into another boat would be the very likely fate of such a foolish launch. But isn’t this exactly what we do with our lives when we go along day-by-day hoping that something better will happened to us or at least nothing worse in life will befall us. This is called living by default. Living by default assumes that there is nothing that you can do to make your life better. And if you know what you can do and don’t do it, you life is no better than a person who doesn’t know.

Goals work as does the magnifying glass. Place a piece of paper on the sidewalk in the bright sun on a clear summer day. Stand there for about an hour or two and see what happens. Assuming that you secured the paper to the ground with a weight on the edge of it, it will still be there, little warmer perhaps, but unchanged. Now take out a magnifying glass and point it onto the center of the paper and pull the magnifying back, a little and just a little more until the light spot that is beamed onto the paper begins to sizzle within seconds and thus burns a hole through it. The magnifying glass takes the rays of the sun and concentrates it onto the paper such that now those same warm sun rays can do things that it could not until it was concentrated. Thus is the power of goals. Goals are the magnifying glass which take the infinite powers of your mind and concentrate them with such power that they can burn and cut through any obstacle set before it. There is nothing more powerful than a made up mind with a goal at the forefront.

I first heard the following example by the great motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, and I want to give you my synopsis of it. Let us take the world’s greatest archer, someone who say could hit a bulls eye 10 out of 10 times from a hundred yards away with a bow and arrow. I can show you a way to out shoot this professional archer even though you have never picked up a bow and arrow. How? you say. Easy. Just blindfold this archer, spin him around a few times, and ask him to shoot. Sounds silly doesn’t it. You are surely asking yourself right now. “How can he hit a target he can’t even see?” Well, I have an even better question for you. “How can you hit a target that you don’t even have?” You must have your goals.

Now there is another trap that you can fall into. Some people confuse activity with accomplishment. Some load up there lives with all sorts of insignificant time wasting activities that they literally crowd out the days of their lives making it impossible to achieve anything significant. You must first know and define what is important to you. Then you must start about with plans and steps to its accomplishment. (More on this a little later in this chapter.) Do you know what a processional caterpillar is? It is a furry little caterpillar which follows unquestionably the caterpillar in front of it. The assumption is that the first caterpillar in the line (and sometimes there may be dozens of caterpillars following each other) knows where the food is or is at least the one on alert and looking for it. A scientist, tried an experiment. He found a row of processional caterpillars traveling along a woods trail. He directed the first caterpillar to follow the back of the last caterpillar until all of the caterpillars formed a perfect circle, following each other round and round and round. He put some pine needles, food for caterpillars, in the middle of the circle.

The caterpillars followed each other in circles for hours, days, until they all literally dropped dead from exhaustion when the goal, the food, the pine needles was right in their midst. When you do not set your own agenda, that is, set and follow your own goal, you become swept away by the agenda and thinking of the masses. Without a goal, you become just like the processional caterpillar, doing what others do, going where others go and having what others have. If I stopped you right now and ask you what is you primary goal in life, could you tell me without hesitation? In order to not become the human processional caterpillar, you must discover your life purpose and set your life goal.

Let Us Live Life Now (An Inspired Essay)

I have waited over 37 years to present this essay to the world. I wrote it when I was a very young boy just out of high school. It was amazing how it all came to me. It came to me in inspired spurts of 15 to 20 minutes at a time over a 4 day period. I hope that you enjoy it and appreciate its simple but profound message.

How many of us are letting life whiz by? How many of us are letting irretrievable time pass us, as we continue to look over the horizon, waiting to live for that magical wonderland which is to come? How many years will be wasted before we are enlightened and realize that our waiting-to-live is such a tragic farce?

An explosive illustration of the above can be seen in this quote by Stephan Leacock: “How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, ‘When I am a big boy.’ But what is that? The big boy says, ‘When I grow up.” And then, grown up, he says, ‘When I get married.’ But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to ‘When I’m able to retire.’ And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.”

Life must be captured in its movement. Life lies in its progression, not after the fulfillment of goals, because once all goals are fulfilled there is no more life.

Implicit within this concept of life is its central purpose: enjoyment. Every activity a human being engages in is goal-oriented consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, everything one does should be either potentially or immediately directed to enjoyment.

Life is like a trip on a train. We either look out the window and enjoy the colors, sights and panorama of the landscape as we pass them by,or we sleep throughout the entire ride, only to awaken at the end of our road. Is it that the trip is as important as the reaching of the destination.

Life is like an exquisite and sumptuously prepared banquet placed before us. The individual who races through the appetizers and entre, to be able to quickly get to and finish with the dessert, has overlooked that the pleasure of the banquet, and life is in the savoring of it, bite by bite, each and every part of it. We cannot listen to a completed piece of music – all at once; we can only enjoy it as it moves through us – note by note. Fulfillment should not be exalted to the near exclusion of the progression. Progression and fulfillment should be considered as one on an ever intensifying continuum, that is, fulfillment is progression at its highest and most glorious stage.

We should try to approach life as a never-ending progression of enjoyment. We should think more of the now movement. We should begin to live more within the now movement. Since the progression or movement toward a goal is usually longer than the experience of its fulfillment, then one should be aware of and try to experience the joy of the progression as well as the fulfillment.

An important concept to the understanding of enjoying the progression of life lies within the concept of stimulus variation, or simply “experience”. In 1954, a group of scientists, by the names of Benton, Heron and Scott, did an experiment at McGill University where college students were paid $20.00 a day (a lot of money in 1954) to do absolutely nothing.

For 24 hours a day, they laid on comfortable beds in a room kept at an even temperature. Their eyes, ears and hands were shielded to minimize stimulus variation. Whereas some individuals chronically complaining of the drudgery of having to get up and go to work every morning would consider this situation a Utopian means of making a living. The fact was that under the conditions of the experiment, few subjects could endure more than 2 or 3 days! the craving for stimulus variation was overwhelming!

Stimulus variation is anything that can be experienced. It could be eating an ice cream cone, being depressed through a love lost, attending a church revival or meditating on life. Stimulus variation means experience. Experience is the synonym for life, for living implies experiencing. Life should be a continuum of achieving higher and higher levels of experience. Variety is indeed the spice of life, and stimulus variation is necessary for the emotional satisfaction and happiness of the human organism. Inertia is anathema. One is happiest when he is vitally absorbed in something which interests him. Even pain can deepen and mature, sometimes opening consciousness to a more profound understanding of life.

I often thought that a world completely without any problems or needs would be utopia, but now I wonder. If there are no problems or needs, there can be no goals. If there are no goals, there is no life, activity or stimulus variation toward its fulfillment. If there is no stimulus variation, as was noted above, there will be no emotional satisfaction, therefore no enjoyment, therefore no happiness. Is then suffering, pain and problems a reflection of the infinite intelligence and benevolence of the universe?

Since absorption and activity are so vital to the emotional well-being of the individual, we are naturally led into what forms the core of all our activity: our daily work. Alas, far too many people find their daily “work” an unenjoyable and unpleasant experience. As I once read: “Nothing is really work, unless you would rather be doing something else.”

Too many jobs are ill-chosen on the basis of the salary alone. Sorry is the man or woman who lives only from payday to payday at a job which he or she despises. The majority of our lives are spent on the jobs or in the careers we have chosen. Can we really afford such a waste? For all we know the life we have may end tomorrow.

I find that sadly too many of us live sporadically and in pieces by finding life only when we “go out and have a ball” instead of also living, enjoying and experiencing life – right now.

A happy gardener who enjoys the jokes, laughter and conversation of his co-workers, the beauty of the landscape and has the appreciation in his heart of being able to express his joy through his work is much more “successful” in life than the pressured executive who has gone for the third time for the treatment of his stress-induced ulcers.

So let us stop putting off the living and loving of life, for living and loving and enjoying life can only be in the present moment. Let us capture it. Let us awake from our stupor. Let us at last silence the echoing laughter of the tyrant Time, who devours our lives as endlessly wait for him to bring us into an impossible experience of the receding future.

The Universe Rewards Action!

The Universe rewards action with results. The Universe rewards immediate action with immediate results. There is a library that I like to frequent that is about a mile from my home. Like many modern buildings, it has a pair of automatic doors that open inward. There is a pressure-sensitive device that is outside on the ground under a hard plastic door mat in front of the entrance. It is not until you step forward that the door opens. The Universe kind of works like that library door too. It is not until you step forward will the door to all knowledge and experience open inward for you. Knowing that the door to all of your experience will open in this way, you must step forward first, and the door will open once you move and take action steps.

The question always becomes if someone has decided upon a desired goal and what to do next becomes obvious, then why is it that we don’t always take immediate action. There is only one answer, and that answer is that we allow procrastination to impede and stop our progress and self-realization.

Procrastination is the Monster of Failure

We procrastinate which is another word for hesitate, doubt because we are in a fear state. The fear is always a fear of overwhelm. We fear that we will become overwhelmed and unable to carry out that which we say we want. So we temporarily stop ourselves and give ourselves a host of excuses and rationalizations as to way we are “not yet ready,” or that we “need to prepare ourselves just a little more.” No, success doesn’t work that way. When we are truly committed to something to happen we are willing to “get rich or die trying.” When you are willing to do whatever it takes, you feel the fear, but do it anyway. Also, there is another problem which is in how we define the problem. I would like you to no longer use the word fear to describe the feeling that you have when you are about to undertake something new and/or risky. I would like for you to substitute the word “excitement” for the word fear. An inexperienced mountain climber feels “fear”, an experienced mountain climber feels “excitement”. In the body, it is the same feeling. How you react to it depends a lot on how you choose to label it.

Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Lousy

You read right. Anything worth doing is worth doing lousy. Just do something anything – make corrections later. It is better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly. One of the things that get in the way of taking immediate action on the part of so many people is that they convince themselves that they must be “perfectly ready” to start to do something. One, no matter who you are, there is no such thing as “perfectly ready”. If you were perfectly ready, if there were such a thing, would mean that you have already accomplished what you want for if you have perfectly done anything, there is nothing left to do. Perfectionism, which is no more than an unconsciously clever stalling tacit, give you the excuse that you cannot do anything just yet because you are not ready yet. Therefore it is easy to become in a perpetual state of preparation which is the faux justification for not being able to start. Perfectionism produces the paralysis of analysis which in turn creates a state of immediate non-action versus one of immediately of taking action.

The Myth of Tomorrow

When you pray for an answer, and you get it in the form of a creative idea which you must begin to carry out, God expects immediate action from you to continue to receive His support. Why? Because you are caught up in the belief in the myth of tomorrow. There is no such thing. Tomorrow is just an illusion. The past is just a memory. You are then let with all that you or me ever have to work with, the only reality – the eternal now. Doubt me? Put off what it is that you must do until you arrive at what you perceive to be “tomorrow”. What are you left with? You are in the “now” again. Put off what you want to do for another week, another month or another year. The moment you start to do anything and at last take the action you should have taken a long time ago, you are still again in the “now” moment. And I’m sure that I didn’t have to tell you this. You could have figured it out on your on, that is, we can only do anything in the moment of now, but until this insidious habit is brought to the surface in the light of common sense, you continue asleep under the guise that somehow, someway the Universe will work differently if you just wait long enough.

Strike While the Iron is Hot

Inspiration is time sensitive. Don’t believe it? Ask yourself, how many times you have had a great idea for a business, a book, a special project only for you to put it off and find that someone else has taken “your” idea and run with it? When is your energy and motivation the greatest once you are inspired with a great idea? Isn’t it in the beginning, when you first receive it, and providing you don’t go around telling everyone about it and asking for opinions, the energy and excitement from imagining all of the possibilities builds up inside of you more and more. It is precisely at this moment were immediate action is the most productive. Why? Because action creates more action. This again is the Law of Attraction. And the more you immediately do, the faster you will learn what you have to do next.

Learn By Doing

Though, I most definitely believe that study and research is important, but when it is time to action, you must act quickly to create momentum and quite momentum going in a positive direction. Another consideration is that you will need to learn what you obvious don’t know now to achieve your goal. If you knew everything that you needed to know, you would probably have already achieved your goal for to master anything requires action and thus experience which then becomes your guide for further growth. There is a built-in economy of action, and that it that we learn by doing. The actions that you take will either bring you closer to your goal or further away. The formula or the secret is quite simple. Whatever you do that brings you closer and closer to your goal, do more of it. Whatever takes you farther and farther away from your goal, do no more of it. When whatever you are doing makes things become easier and easier, you are on the right track, and if whatever you are doing makes things become more and more difficult then conversely, you are on the wrong track.

Know When Prayer is Not Enough

Would you like to hear a good joke that illustrates this idea of taking immediate and timely action? Okay. Here we go:

Eleven year old, Lisa and her six year old brother, Mark were on the way to Sunday which they walked every Sunday from home though the lovely countryside of the small town in which they live. Today was a bright, sunny day. Birds chirping in the trees. The fragrance of sweet white honeysuckle flowers perfumed the air. Strict instructions were given from mother that they not be late and to arrive punctually before the Sunday services start, for if they were to arrive late to Sunday school – they would be grounded inside for the rest of the day.

“But, I don’t see any problem in arriving on time,” thought Lisa, “since we left out a half hour earlier than usual.”
“Look at that blue and yellow butterfly,” said Mark. “Isn’t it beautiful!”
“It surely is, brother. Look at that view of the valley from here. We can see almost the entire town below from here.”
“Cool!” exclaimed Mark. “It’s pretty.”
They got so caught up in the beauty of the countryside that time quickly whizzed by until an expected 45 minutes had passed.
“Lisa! What time is it?”
“Oh, my God, it’s 10:45 a.m., and it will take us at least 20 minutes to get there!”
“Do you think we will be late?” ask little Mark.
“Oh, I don’t know,” panics Lisa. “Maybe. Let’s kneel and pray!”
“No,” replies Mark, “let’s run and pray!”

Even if you are not prepared for the unexpectedly, even if you are worried or scared, still take immediate action when there is nothing left to do but act. Run and pray!

God Speaks Through Circumstances

Once you begin to take action on realizing your chosen goal immediately and quickly, God begins to communicate with you. God begins to speak to you through circumstances. No, let me take it even a bit further. God IS circumstances. Circumstances are really of the material body of God. This makes it easy to understand how and why “coincidences” work. Let me try to explain it to you in a different way. Let us say you are in a nighttime dream, and let us say that you realize that you are dreaming, also called a lucid dream. In the dream, you think of an elephant, and “coincidentally” an elephant appears. You expect to find a bag of money, and lo and behold, a man in a white suit walks up to you from a park bench, introduces himself, and says that he has been instructed to give you this leather bag containing $1,000,000 cash in one-hundred dollar bills. “Wow!” you think to yourself again. “What a coincidence!”

Now, as you sit there reading this, you are thinking, “So what, Charles. Coincidences happen all of the time in dreams.” I then ask you why is it so easy for you to accept this. You then say, “Because in a dream, I am the dream and everything that is produced in the dream is really me.” To that I say that in your daytime dream called waking reality, you are also the dream and everything that is produced in this waking daytime dream is also really you. I will take it even a step further and say that you are really a part of God. We are Divine Personalities as part of God’s Divine Dream of Himself.