What’s Going On? #85
ALONG THE WAY: Let circumstances be.
THIS MONTH’S THOUGHT. Don’t push. Let Life unfold naturally.
SPIRITUALISM / MENTALISM: (Excerpts from a talk by Dr. Bob Gibson at the Chapel of Light, Whitney, Texas, November 1986)
So, we’ll put mentalism on one side and we’ll put spiritual on the other side. We’ll take mentalism first. First off, let me state one thing. I’m not in favor of anything or apposed to anything. In fact, mentalism comes in very handy now and then. Mentalism is the ability to use the mind to gain the things one wants. We all want pleasure and comfort. We want a little attention. Some people want more than a little. We sometimes want a little approval if we can get it. And we want to feel pretty important or needed. Especially we want to feel needed until somebody starts needing us pretty bad and then we find out it’s not such a hot deal in the first place. Sounds good until it happens. So when we use mental power, of which there is a jillion different ways of doing it, we can gain pleasure and comfort, attention, approval, importance. One way to gain attention is to have a lot of money or things and if we work on it we can get those. We have to think positive and we can repeat the same idea over and over and over until it gets embedded in the brain. We can then accomplish a great number of things. There is a little kick to it. We have to pay for it some way or other. Nothing in this world comes free. There is no such thing as a free lunch. That’s pretty accurate. So sometimes a person thinks they can have many things by using mental powers, and you can. But you don’t always know what the pay off is going to be. I had a very good friend I’ve known many years. This was quite a long time ago. They built a house in their head. The man and his wife agreed on it perfectly. They had it described to the nth degree. They had beams in the ceiling. It had a vaulted ceiling. The material it was made out of. The kind of ground it was on. They had it in great detail and they carried this around. This was mental exercise. They kept it going. He was a professional man just out of school and wasn’t making a lot of money. He was struggling to get along. Their oldest son got run over by an automobile and they got a settlement that easily bought the house. Not sweat. No bother. Now they hadn’t put that in. But you see there’s always this balance comes out. I could report hundreds and hundreds of similar situations. Not all of them quite as drastic. But always there is a price. So if we want to use mentalism it is an easy thing to do. Oh, it takes effort. You’ve got to keep reminding yourself of what you’ve got to do and you can’t slip off and woe, woe, woe is poor me and play the victim role. You’ve got to play the positive up, up, up all the time. Which is pretty good.
Now spiritual activity is entirely different. Spiritual activity is based on having consciousness. The more consciousness you have, the more accurate you’re reporting. And in order to be spiritual, all this has to go, the desire for it. Spiritual is a matter of giving up all the things people think are essential. We call them the four dual basic urges: to gain pleasure and comfort, gain attention, gain approval, gain importance, escape pain, escape being ignored or rejected and all these other things. You give those up, surrender. I’m happy with whatever I have. If I’m rejected, fine. If I’m ignored, that’s fine. If I have a little pain now and then, so what. I’ve found that spiritual people have a little pain. You’re liable to run into a whole bunch of things that are uncomfortable. But so what! Everything in this world just comes to pass, anyway. That’s why it came. To pass. So why get so agitated about things not being exactly like I want them. So we surrender and say, “I’m very happy to be alive”. In surrender you are paying the price already. I don’t have to have all this stuff over here (attention, approval, pleasure, importance). So you’ve paid the price. You’ve paid your dues, so to speak. You have surrendered your urge to be non-disturbed. If you stop to look, everything you work at is to be non-disturbed. The price has been paid when you surrender. Consciousness is the only essential to be spiritual. We are already spiritual. Spirit is Life. Spirit is here whether we use mentalism or we let Spirit run things. We don’t use it. We use mentalism instead. When you have consciousness, Spirit is receiving true information moment by moment. If you’re not very aware you turn in a lot of Not-I’s that say the whole purpose of living is to be non-disturbed and the way to get it is to be complaining, sticking up for my rights, blaming, pleasing (whether we want to or not), believing and doing everything that some authority told us, and we improve ourselves. So we stay in a state of conflict. We struggle to have our way. And when we don’t have our way, we feel like a victim. When we’re reporting from conflict, we are not reporting accurately to Spirit.
In mentalism we think of what we want. I want a new house. I will visualize it. I will think on it I will affirm. I’ll have that new house. And you will. But you will pay for it. And you pay for it with something that you probably didn’t want to pay with. Where if you surrender, you’re already paid. You have paid all this self-interest, all this total involvement with the Not-I’s. Mentalism is not bad, wrong, improper. It is only that it is not the source of removal of what is called difficulties in the world. Real difficulties are removed by an increase in consciousness. Period. One reports accurately to Spirit and Spirit does all the work.
IDEAS TO WORK WITH:
- There are only two ways to harm a person. One, to be physically harmful by hitting him with a hammer; two, to agree with someone he is a victim.
- It is very dangerous to one’s health to be a victim. We use mentalism to destroy ourselves by affirming that we are a victim and something out there is to blame for the sorry state of our affairs. We’re reporting that. We’re consistent We’re standing on it. It’s there day in and day out. We’ve got a picture of it. We go downhill.
- If anyone cares to look at it, no one is a victim of anything except their own state of being.
- If we can use mentalism to your advantage, we can unknowing be using it to our disadvantage.
- The hardest thing to sell in the world is to sell someone on not being a victim. There’s great sales resistance to giving up our victimhood.
P.S. We have put together 190 of the IDEAS TO WORK WITH, which are all verbatim quotes from the Teachings. Each one is on business size parchment card in a cute plastic or glass container. ($15.00 covers the cost of them, including mailing) If you are interested in them, let us know. We have also finished another 190 cards. E-mail: donnalancaster@hillsboro.net or 254-694-6956.
A STORY:
It is possible I could live another thirty years. So four months ago I looked at my situation and decided I would like to live those thirty years as optimally as possible. I did not want to have limited energy if there were things I could do to enhance the well being of this precious body I live in.
Once again, when a decision is made with feeling, Spirit operates on that information. All sorts of opportunities came about for me to check out.
I spent two weeks at a health institute near Austin. Talk about suggestions! I was bombarded with thousands of them. I waded through wheat grass juice, raw fruits and veggies, no meat, no dairy products, no caffeine, no salt, not sugar, etc. Tons of information was there for me to check out. Some of the information was valid for me. Some was not.
When I got home all sorts of food supplements seemed to manifest around me. Since I am 100% subject to suggestion 100% of the time the food bar was covered with bottles of cute colorful tablets. All of these tablets designed to do miraculous things for the body and to fill someone’s back pocket and drain mine.
Whoa! I had to step back and re-evaluate this situation. This was getting out of hand. It’s very possible I don’t need any supplements. This miraculous instrument I live in only needs for me to listen to the information it is constantly giving me. It will tell me what I need. This takes a lot of practice and I’m not very good at it yet. But it’s there for me if I work at it. For instance, if I’m hungry when I go to the grocery store, the body will tell me what to eat.
I’ve heard Dr. Bob say to eat only when you’re hungry. Eat only what you’re hungry for. Quit when you’re full. There it is. Easy. Simple. Workable.
Those cunning Not-I’s love to make things complicated. I bought the suggestion that complicated was of great value– hook, line and sinker! I will pay attention and check them out before I buy them. This will certainly conserve much energy.
Today I will feel good. One of the finest and easiest ways to do that is to act myself into the feeling I want for today—to feel on top of the world!
