Dear readers,

Thank you for coming today.  It is a beautiful, sunny spring day in Iowa, in my home town, where I have a large south facing apartment that looks out upon an enormous field that stretches as far as I can see, to the horizon, and I feel it is time.  I can hear the words.  I have something very new and hopefully valuable to share with you–my latest book.  As you may know, I am the author of The Evolution Angel: A Physician’s Experiences with Death and the Divine, The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle: The Miracle Worker’s Handbook–most blessed indeed to win the Nebulae Award for “Best Spiritual Book of the Year 2005,” (I know, it’s embarrassing and totally transparent, but I have to brag at least a little bit to get you to take me seriously),  and The Hidden Parables, a retranslation of the 30 enigmatic parables of the teacher.  For several years, many readers have been asking me if I could write an updated and condensed form of these books, which would encapsulate the basic principles within them in a succinct and easily read way. If you will have an open mind, where ever you are coming from, are curious and knowledgeable about quantum mechanics, string theory, multiple dimensions and the like, and listen to the scientific and logical arguments and new translations within, this book could change  your entire life and the way that you live.

I am 90% finished and it is time to get the ball rolling.

Now, there are several classes of people that are going to like this book a whole lot–maybe it will even change their lives forever–and there are a few groups that will not take to it at all.  That is to be expected.  No approach will please everyone.  I’ll be up front with you about this so that you won’t waste any of your valuable time in case you are in one of the groups that cannot tolerate this kind of approach to Spirit and Science.

If you are in pain, some kind of trouble or difficult, unsolvable situation, are just plain lost, or just want to improve your life with spiritual principles that make some kind of logical, reasonable, and modern scientific sense, this book may really be just right for you, and show you some of the most important principles that will help you get in touch with Divine Intelligence, align yourself with it–so that you can help yourself out of your predicament and learn what you want to learn.

If you are curious, perhaps a bit bewildered by the sometimes confusing and seemingly nonsensical elements of the biblical and other scriptures, but want to know more, intuit that there is more to learn, and want to find out about everything you can, this book will help you.  If you have an open mind, a mind that is willing to take a second look at a spiritual perspective that may have really turned you off or even injured you in the past, this book will give you such a drastically new outlook on the world that it can change your life.

If you are highly educated, intelligent, and scientific and find some aspects of Western spirituality confusing and incongruent with your scientific knowledge of the universe, but feel somewhere deep inside your soul that there must be a core of truth within that might help you understand yourself and your world better, this book is for you.

On the other hand, if you are of a fundamentalistic mindset, this book is not for you.  Nothing will change the way you think–and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, unless your beliefs cause you to dwell in hate over others and cause them pain.  Some of the greatest people I have worked with in medicine and other fields were pure fundamentalists, and they were great people to work with on a daily basis in real life. Very reliable, honest, straightforward hard-working people.

If you are at the other end of the spectrum, the highly liberal end, and believe that all Western spirituality is totally beyond hope, an absolutely ridiculous and very harmful fairy tale, purely synthesized to make money and gain power; if you have a closed mind–there are liberal and “new age” “fundamentalists” with closed minds too– to any new translation or outlook,  this book is also not for you.  Nothing is going to change your mind either…and that is totally OK too.  I know some great people in daily life who are very fine, upstanding people who have absolutely no tolerance or patience for listening to a new view point.  They are just fine like they are and I have no intention of trying to change the way they think in any way.

This book will be a purely not-for-profit endeavor.  It is actually published in its, as yet, unproofed form, about 90% finished, below at absolutely no charge. In the final analysis, on the big balance sheet, I don’t think I’ve ever actually made any money writing or selling spiritual, self-help books anyway–even though the average estimate is that about 60,000 people have read them– and I now only wish to open-source all of it.  The knowledge in these books is not “mine” to sell–that is stupid.  It was given to me freely and I want to give it to anyone who is interested freely as well.  This current condensation will be published on line of course, Podcast, and the like, entirely for free, but will also be published as very small, literally pocket-sized booklets, about 1/4 inch thick and easily carried in your pocket, purse, or pack for easy reference.  It will have a plain black cover with only the words The Miracle Worker’s Handbook, printed in gold ink on the cover.  I am to keep my name minimized, as well as my personality.  It’s best for all concerned, and will help me keep my ego from getting involved. There will always be something about an actual solid, paper book, that will trump any electronic version and be a valuable addition to many people’s spiritual tool kit.

The first printing will cost about $800, and can easily be done here in my home town.  Very simple and straightforward.  We want to keep the cost down to about $.75 per copy, or less down the line, when we print larger quantities.  When the first copies come out, we will mail about 20 to every church we can think of that would be interested in knowing about the information within–and I’ve spoken at scores of them that would like to have copies.  We will openly ask for donations, starting now, to accomplish this printing.  Even donations as small as $5-10 are gladly accepted, and all money will be handled immaculately so that it is only used for publication of the book–spreading the word so to speak.  If you understand any of what has been written you will know that it can never be otherwise.  Donations can be sent to Dr. R. Todd Michael, 5910 West Lincoln Way #305,  Ames, Iowa  50014.  Everyone who donates will receive a signed first edition with a personal note of thanks. We are so pleased to announce that as of this day, generous donations from literally around the world, as far away as China, have reached the 25% level needed for hard publication.

I have published 90% of the completed book below within this blog for you to read and review now.  It completely updates and summarizes the Twelve Conditions of a Miracle, and the important points of the newly retranslated 30 parables from The Hidden Parables–both books first published by Tarcher/Penguin, in New York.  These new translations show how cutting edge science is merging with spirituality.  They clearly outline a path to higher knowledge and are completely in line with contemporary “new thought” spiritual theory–as we would expect.  They show how the teachings of the Nazarene are actually in complete alignment with modern science, including Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, Quantum physics, and finally the cutting edge of String Theory or M-theory, which shows that there are many universes, many dimensions that we cannot perceive, and many possibilities that have not yet been realized but must exist, must come to be in some universe somewhere.  It shows how a “miracle,” something very beneficial yet highly unlikely or “impossible,” can certainly occur.

Many of us have experienced miracles in our own lives, so we know that this sort of thing happens.  But we don’t know how or why.  We yearn for a spiritual perspective which does not turn a blind eye to the obvious truths of modern experimental science but delves into the cause and effect relationships that science has disclosed.  We intuit that there must be some way, some day, to reconcile these two ways of thinking about things.  This book, although only scratching the surface, does just that.  I am educated in science, have a degree in modern, mainstream medicine, but am also a minister, degreed psychologist, and see things through the eyes of Spirit when things are going just right.  The two ways of thinking can be reconciled–although that may sound unlikely to you at this point.  That is understandable.

Feel free to print this booklet out in its current form, to read or share with friends. Or, email me for a PDF copy that prints out very well (evolutionangel55@gmail.com).  The only thing asked is that you do not use it to make any money for yourself.  That would defeat your purposes, and is not necessary.  If you follow the principles within in your life, you will inevitably be taken care of automatically.  For in the end, the miraculous is quite natural, logical, and easy–almost effortless–and will benefit you and others around you in untold ways.  It won’t take you more than about an hour to read, so don’t worry.  It won’t waste your time.  Have FAITH my great friends, and read on.  Please be patient with the obvious ocassional typos and the like, this is only the first draft and we are on top the errors. We have a proof reader on the case as we speak already, so subsequent drafts have gotten fairly clean.  But enjoy the process of reading and know that, as the great teacher said,

“You too will do even greater works than these.”

Note: For a free copy of the other new book, the sequel to The Evolution Angel, or to book a personal session with Dr. Michael, please email your request to evolutionangel55@gmail.com

The Miracle Worker’s Handbook

The Condensed Principles of the

The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle,

and

The 30 Hidden Parables

A non-profit, open-sourced publication

by Rev. Dr. Todd Michael

Printed and distributed by

The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle Foundation

Ames, Iowa, USA

An Unproofed Advanced Preview

Dedicated to

EunJin Bang, PhD

COPYRIGHT, R. Todd Michael, April, 2012

Personal Note to Readers

Two thousand years ago, a Jewish mystic, the Nazarene, hung by nails on a cross suffering one of the most agonizing deaths known.  It was a turning point in the history of mankind.  Some believe he knew “everything,” and left it in his teachings. He repeatedly told of us a realm he called “the Kingdom of Heaven.”  It takes only a slight shift in perception to see that he was likely speaking of what we  now refer to in common scientific parlance as another “dimension,” perhaps even another Universe.

Two thousand years later, a slight man is propped in a wheelchair, barely able to move the slightest muscle.  He suffers from Lou Gerig’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also one of the most agonizing forms of death known. It slowly paralyzes the entire body until it can no longer move.  This man, Dr. Stephen Hawkings, Research Director for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, a man who has sold more than ten million books, is also believed to have developed a “Theory of Everything.”  He too tells us that there are other dimensions, other Universes.  And he has proved it mathematically.

The language each man used is highly divergent, but it could be that they were saying much the same thing.

Could it be that both men arrived at the same levels of profound knowledge, but by different means?  One would hope.  For the truth is the truth, no matter from which direction it is approached.  But how can the knowledge of these two men be reconciled?  It would seem impossible, but it is not.  This book will attempt to make a new beginning in which we can learn how to see how the great truths of Christianity–and even other great religions–and the truths of Big Science, are not at odds with each other at all.  It will also attempt to show, via new translations of the original Greek texts—those identical to the texts that 99% of all university level, mainstream scholars use–that the Nazarene knew every bit as much as the most advanced scientists, and tried to tell us what he knew.  Those of us that worked on this book and these retranslations wanted to make sure they could stand up under the close scrutiny of real, mainstream scholars.  The real meat of what he was trying to tell us can be found fairly easily if you know where to look for it and how to look for it.

To begin to understand how Spirit and Science are starting to merge, we first need to know a bit about science.  Now, hang with me. Don’t freeze up! It’s really pretty interesting stuff, and we will make it very short and sweet.  The history of science can be condensed into a few paragraphs and is a good place to start.  Believe me.  It truly matters to you as a seeker of the truth, as a spiritual person.   If we leave out a few things in this condensed history, bear with us.  Basically, in the 1600′s, Isaac Newton, who held essentially the same position as Stephen Hawkings holds now at Cambridge, formulated his basic laws of physics, and invented calculus, a phenomenal demonstration of pure genius, that allowed him to think through otherwise unsolvable mathematical dilemmas.

For several centuries his theories were thought to be absolutely true and inviolate.  Then in the early 1900’s, an obscure Swiss patent clerk, Albert Einstein, working mostly on his own, shattered Newton’s laws with his Theory of General Relativity.  Newton, although it seemed unthinkable, was apparently wrong. Einstein, a man who said he was, “only interested in the thoughts of God,” showed that time and space curved or warped in ways that were strange and miraculous to behold.  He had figured out how things at the grand cosmic level really worked.  For the time being, at least.

But only two decades later another man, Niels Bohr showed that Einstein’s theories did not work at all, when applied to the atomic and subatomic levels that were just being discovered and studied.  There was an enormous disconnect that baffled everyone.  Bohr showed–and this will turn out to be of critical spiritual importance to you as a learning “miracle worker” who seeks to change his or her life for the better – that human thought, human decisions,  influence the very existence of matter, including the way that subatomic particles behaved. He was once rumored to have said, “These particles [electrons, photons and the like], must be conscious.”  And he proved it. Something also strange and miraculous to behold; something Einstein puzzled over for his entire life.

This disconnect persisted for decades. That which occurred at the very large levels, the levels of planets, stars, and galaxies, simply did not jive with what seemed to happen at the level of the very small, the level of atoms and subatomic particles, like quarks and bosons. In 1943, beginning with a program developed by Werner Heisenberg–the guy who is famous for proving that “the observer always alters the observed” – the seeds of something that would later be called “String Theory” began to slowly emerge.  Although it took decades and countless hours of deep thought and work by many brilliant scientists, String Theory was eventually proven mathematically, and now goes by the name of “M-theory.”  This theory says that there are not but our familiar four dimensions, but eleven, and that there are an infinite number of universes– something also strange and miraculous to think about–and also of very utilitarian, highly spiritual importance for a learning miracle worker.  You’ll see why, if you will give this small book but a chance.

We have left a lot out obviously, but these are the most salient points of how Big Science has gotten to where it is now.  But, it is only 2012, after all, and perhaps in 2112, or 3012, all of this, even the incredibly cutting-edge of “M Theory” will appear ignorant or even quaint.   We have only begun to scratch the surface. What seems entirely probable to some of us, even inevitable, is that as science progresses, it will eventually merge with spirituality in an elegant and beautiful way. By the time you have finished this short booklet, I believe you will begin to see how this may occur in time. For again, the truth is the truth.  It may be approached from different directions and using different methods, but when it is found it will be the One Truth.

PREFACE

For many of us, Christianity is a truly great spiritual tradition.  For others it is an enormous failure that has caused great pain and suffering through history. Then again, some of us have “been around the block” – we have explored many other religions and cultures around the world, trying to find the truth, and found problems with all the religions.  Human beings can misuse knowledge that is perfectly good.  But we need not throw the baby out with the bath water.  There are some very great truths at the core of Christianity and other religions, truths that can be of enormous benefit to those who seek to improve their lives and their worlds. Some of us, here in the West, have come full circle in our search for the truth, and come back home to the traditions we grew up with, finding a fresh, new perspective entirely aligned with the most contemporary and evolved self-help and spiritual literature.

For example, a close friend of mine, a highly intelligent person, recently made a big effort, along with many other Westerners, to see the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism.  She was seeking, very sincerely yearning to know the truth, and thought this man might know more than what we have here at home. She had been turned off by Christianity, and especially by the “religions” that had formed to espouse its principles, but in the end mainly used the knowledge within to gain money and power.  But what this great man said shocked her.  To paraphrase slightly, he said, “We don’t need any more Buddhists.  Go back home. The truth is the truth, and you have it right before you in your own Christianity.  Go back home.  And dig deeper, look more deeply. If you do, you will find that everything you need is right there.”

Many of us have already done this:  We were raised in standard Christian traditions, but when we became older, we decided that some of the things about Christianity seemed not to make sense at all. It might have even embarrassed us as scientists or scholars. Like the notion that a baby born without being baptized in, say, Africa, and who died of starvation would “burn in ‘hell’ for eternity.”  What sort of God would ever allow such a ridiculous thing to happen?  That is ridiculous.  There must be another way of looking at things that is more sensible, loving, caring, helpful, and comforting.

Furthermore, what we learned in our churches seemed to be completely oblivious to the advances of science.  So we started to look elsewhere, and learned about all kinds of other religions, all kinds of ways of thinking, many varieties of philosophy and wisdom that seemed very reasonable and respectable.  Yes, many of them are very great indeed.  Some of us thought these other ways of thinking were superior somehow, and left our Christianity behind entirely.

But right now, in 2012, I cannot tell you how many hundreds of people have told me the same thing:  That they too have come full circle, back to their roots, back to Christianity, and have indeed found what they were looking for–found that the truth was the truth, no matter now it was articulated.  We let go, and let God.   We stopped judging and dwelling on some of the more questionable passages in the scriptures, and concentrated on the core concepts like “treat others as you would have them treat you.”  “Judge not, that you be not judged.”  We started to lighten up a bit, and look at the high side. We tried taking what we were told with faith, and found that it worked just fine.

But we still have some sometimes subconscious problems with certain teachings in our churches here in the West.  Sometimes they sound old fashioned, obsolete, and completely out of touch with all the obviously successful advances that Science has brought us. We are reluctant, sometimes, to talk about our faith.  Some of our beliefs sound irrational and ill informed, we think, and we keep our mouths shut.  We think some people may laugh at us, especially those who are highly educated, mathematical, and scientific.  We worry that others might think we are fools who know nothing of science, completely ignorant of scientific truths, and are only basing our lives on a “fairy tale” that has no really solid proof, logic, or intelligence behind it.  Admit it.  You know what we’re talking about.

We live in a world where Einstein told us of his elegant mathematical truths.  An age in which quantum mechanics, space exploration, the Hubble telescope, an expanding universe, even parallel universes, fantastically complex machines and devices, the Internet, and incredibly powerful particle accelerators are the norm.  Christianity may appear, we think, ignorant and unscientific compared to the solidly proven principles of science that obviously work quite well in the real world.  And so we are embarrassed sometimes to talk about the Nazarene and his teachings, and keep our mouths shut in front of some people.  We don’t want to appear like we are fools.  This book will change that.

For the fact is that Science and Spirit, are beginning to merge.  Think about it for just a moment.  If Jesus of Nazareth was the man we think He was, a fully enlightened being, an extension of the creator of the entire universe, would it not be completely logical that he was privy to the very same scientific truths our best mathematicians and physicists are now bringing to light?  For those of us who have faith and believe, the answer seems obvious.  But that faith need no longer be “blind.”  Because careful, deeper translations of the original Greek texts reveal a teacher who had a genius intellect, a man who understood…everything, perhaps even more than our best scientists.

And this knowledge of “everything,” including the conclusions that have been and will be reached by science, is right there in the original texts.  If you know how to look for it and where to look for it.  The reason why this scientific truth cannot currently be “seen” is because the standard translations, from the original Greek texts of the New Testament, into English, are not full translations.  And it should be noted that the most universally accepted Greek texts, precisely the same ones that 99% of all university level theologians and scholars believe were the original versions of the gospels, were used for the translations. And it should also be noted that the most widely accepted Greek to English dictionary used by scholars was utilized to formulate the translations.  It’s all very carefully drawn from thoroughly mainstream sources. The key to understanding these original scriptures is that a single Greek word can contain layers upon layers of information.  Standard translations all seem to attempt to turn each single Greek word into a single English word.  But this is simply not possible from a scholastic standpoint.  To do so would be to leave a great deal of information out—sometimes very important information.

When the Greek words we are studying are “unpacked” so that you can see all the information they hold, you can begin see that the Nazarene did in fact have a Theory of Everything, just as modern science claims.  It shows the teacher to be far more intelligent, far more brilliant, and up-to-date than we ever imagined–perhaps even ahead of us: a true genius intellect.  This knowledge magnifies the Spirit of God, and in a respectful, reverent, and holy way, a way that I doubt any true believer will have a problem with.  This is information that you as a modern day follower need to know. And it will make you so happy, so proud of your teacher, to see that he was so knowledgeable and so advanced, so wise in his ways of thinking about the world.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could show somehow, in some way that was intelligent and articulate, how to answer questions posed to us by educated scientists and scholars, gently and confidently?  Our teacher, knew all about the conclusions that Big Science is arriving at, and no one can any longer laugh at us behind our backs, as though we were simpletons, mere school children believing blindly in a long obsolete and utterly unproven fairy tale.  This small but highly concentrated boo will give you some of those answers and arm you with some of your own questions, questions that can challenge even the smartest, best-educated scientific and mathematical minds you encounter.  And, it will show you how to change your life in miraculous ways, with techniques that are very practical, carefully described, and within the reach of any sincere seeker.  You can have the life you have always wanted to live.  It is well within your reach.  All you need to do is to figure out how to harness but a tiny fraction of the vast power of the universe that moves all around you and all through your life.  It’s all right here.

INTRODUCTION

Who are we?  What are we?  What is the nature of the Universe we live in?  Are we alone?  Why are we here?  What happens to us when we die? Why is there something, a universe, rather than nothing?  What existed before the current Universe we live in? Is there intelligence behind all the things in nature that we observe and which can, in many instances, determine whether we live or die?  Are there any ways that we can honor, communicate with, and even influence the world around us to increase our chances of survival, solve difficult problems, heal serious disease, or even manifest the things we yearn for?  These are the basic questions human beings have been trying to answer since they made their first appearance on Earth—depending upon whom you rely—somewhere between 400,000 and 100,000 years ago.

In humankind’s earliest phases, we relied upon what are arguably grouped together as “spiritual” sources to try to understand our place in the cosmos.  The first inscribed or recorded evidences we have of human beings are the cave drawings at Chauvet, France, which radiocarbon dating show to be about 40,000 years old. In this Paleolithic period, near the end of the last Ice Age, we see evidence that anthropologists interpret as the drawings of shaman/nesses retreating to the cave, entering trance states, and by their visualizations and drawings, trying to “draw the power out of the caves, out of nature,” trying to favorably influence the gathering of game and food—to increase their prosperity and thus their chances of survival.

The roots of Judaism date back to around 1800 B.C., when it is said that Abraham first refused to worship the multiple idols that were common during that period. He is considered by most Jews to be the first man documented to believe in a single god. Judaism in its more organized form, began with Moses, who is believed to have received the “Ten Commandments” on Mt. Sinai after the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt, around 1500 B.C.

There were a number of other spiritual traditions that sprang up.   For example, we had the Egyptian culture, obviously obsessed with spiritual matters such as an afterlife, so much so as to have hundreds of thousands of men work for decades to build enormous pyramids that would, by their spiritual theories, enable the leaders to live beyond this life, and to influence consciousness and nature in other ways. Many other interesting spiritual, and “secret” mystical societies developed in every culture around the Earth, and continued humanity’s natural fascination with the question: “What is behind it all? Is there something we can do to make our lives better?  What is the real truth?

Two thousand years ago, a man who is mysterious in the eyes of hardcore historians, Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish mystic, made his presence known and advanced the spiritual thinking of mystical Judaism with his unique teachings.  These teachings made such a deep impression upon those who were made aware of them, that they were written down, and recorded in Greek–the language of choice of scholars writing at that time–around 50 to 300 years after his death.

Research suggests that the teacher was probably trilingual. He likely knew both Hebrew and Greek, but spoke privately in Aramaic. In the period of time after his death, before the gospels were written, there is much uncertainty as to what may or may not have been added, deleted, or embellished by oral tradition.  But the core sayings of this man appear to have been fairly accurately recorded in what is now known as the Book of Q—from the German word quelle meaning “source.”  The writers of the four gospels, according to scholarly and even computer analysis, almost certainly used this same reference, this same “source,” to write their well-crafted verses–although a copy of this book has never as yet been unearthed.

Then came the dark ages, in which a single church coalesced, to hold the Nazarene’s teachings and maintain political and economical power that reached far over the Western world, exceeding that of any other political structure.

But while these spiritual developments were occurring, another line of thought was emerging. Coming from the shadowy realms of “Alchemy”–centuries old– this new way of trying to understand the laws of cause and effect, the nature of reality, and who and what we are.  About 300 years ago, an amazing intellect, Isaac Newton, opened up our knowledge of motion and gravity, invented Calculus in 1666, and established other “truths.”  With sheer brilliance, this genius, himself an Alchemist at the time, formulated what are known as Newton’s Law’s, which were simple, apparently irrefutable for centuries, and elegant. The truth, when it is found, always seems to be elegant, simple, beautiful, even obvious in retrospect. Science was born. But what Newton did not tell us is that he had no idea how it all really worked. Where did gravity come from?  What was light? And other mysteries that eluded his careful scrutiny and deepest thought.

SCIENCE IN A NUTSHELL.

Trust me, it’s worth it.   This is part of how you will understand how to harness the power of Spirit to change your life for the better.   Please take just a few brief minutes to read this summary of the history of science.  Believe me it is highly relevant to you as a spiritual seeker.   And, it is especially written for those who have no scientific background at all.  It will help you get up to speed very quickly so you can understand where we are right now, and how we got here.

In the briefest way possible: After Newton got things rolling with his basic laws, things kept evolving. Maxwell was able to put the laws of electricity and magnetism into four wholly elegant and simple equations.  Then, about 100 years ago, everything we thought we understood, and as we pointed out, was shattered by an obscure Swiss patent clerk, Albert Einstein.  Working with his massive intelligence, he showed that things were not at all as they seemed to be.  Although utterly unfathomable at the time, Newton was apparently wrong. Time and space curved and warped in response to gravity and other forces, which he showed in his fantastically simple and elegant Theory of General Relativity: E = mc2.  In short, gravity does not “pull” the Earth towards it and keep it in orbit.  Rather, the mass of the sun is so huge that it creates a warp in the fabric of time and space that Earth rolls along, much like a marble in a curved indentation.  Now we thought we had finally figured it all out, and Einstein became by far the world’s most widely recognized man.

However, in the 1920’s, Einstein’s fabulously intelligent, supremely elegant, and virtually unshakable “truths,” were once again shattered by the theories of Quantum Mechanics, and the paradoxes that are referred to as “The Great Quantum Mysteries.” Niels Bohr and his colleagues, in studying the inner workings of atoms, found that Einstein’s laws simply did not work at the level of the atomic and subatomic.  Very strange things happened when we examined the fabric of time and space with the powerful magnification of particle accelerators and other instruments.  Among other things, the nature of subatomic entities were apparently influenced by thought, by intention, by decisions, something that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, was completely “unscientific,” yet was without a doubt true–as proven by many hundreds of experiments since.  And again, this turns out to be of paramount importance to all learning miracle workers.  It is important because it will show you how you can change your life for the better in an intelligent and very practical, very successful way.

Our particle accelerators got bigger and are getting bigger still, allowing us to look into the fabric of time and space and matter with ever increasing clarity and magnification.  But, the closer scientists examine the fabric of time and space, the more peculiar and mysteriously things seem to act.  As mathematicians and physicists struggled with the data of their experiments, they found that the only way these mysteries could be explained was if there were multiple dimensions, even multiple universes.  And so, as scientists struggled with this disconnect over the following decades, an even more peculiar and more elegant theory emerged, called “String Theory.”

Don’t worry.  Perhaps it sounds difficult and irrelevant.  But it is extremely important for modern spiritual people to have at least a very basic understanding of this way of looking at the world.  For in many people’s opinion, it supports the existence of an intelligent force that created the Universe.  As it turns out, the chances that this Universe and this Earth formed randomly so that carbon-based life forms could form DNA molecules and increasingly complex life forms is so statistically unlikely that it is literally beyond comprehension.  You would be more likely to win the lottery twenty times in a row than to exist in a Universe where every single major force process since the Big Bang in so fantastically fine-tuned in a random way.  Not only does the delicate set up of the Universe suggest intelligence, it suggests an intelligence of such a high magnitude that is utterly impossible for us as human beings, at this point in time, to conceive.

Very briefly, M-Theory claims that the universe is composed of incredibly small vibrating strings and loops of energy, and membranes or “branes,” surrounding them–a concept that seems mathematically to explain everything all at one time. (Wait until you see how this can impact your life and help you solve your problems, attain your dreams!)  Our entire universe may be one of these membranes, stretched out in enormous scale. In time, and after decades of argument and dissent, this theory was eventually proven one night during a thunderstorm with two great minds working on two blackboards.  Their proof had great mathematical precision, and again, elegance, such that it has been virtually impossible to as yet, disprove.  This theory explains how things work at the astronomical level, as Einstein showed, while at the same time explaining how things work at the subatomic level.  It was thus renamed the Theory of Everything.  It appears, at least for the time being, to be the “Unified Field Theory” that Einstein puzzled over unsuccessfully for his entire life.  And, although it includes provisions for experimental proofs that the mind influences the nature of particles, it still doesn’t tell us how.

The conclusions of this M-Theory, the Theory of Everything, indicate that our Universe is a very, very strange place indeed. For it is not composed only of our familiar our dimensions, but eleven.  And, it indicates that parallel universes, most likely an infinite number of them, exist right along side the one we live within.  And there is absolutely nothing to say in any of this that there could not be some kind of intelligent life in these other dimensions, or a higher intelligence regulating and overseeing everything—God.  Nothing to say that we might, as science advances, find ways to access, perceive, and even communicate with these other dimensions, which may, for all we know at the present, be only a fraction of a millimeter away–and this higher intelligence, which may already be inside us.

Ah, but however advanced all this may sound, it is after all, only 2012 as this book is being written.  This is worth pointing out again.  If we look back but 100 years to 1912, we can see how incredibly “ignorant” we were at that time.  What will science have revealed by the year 2112?  Or for that matter, 3012?   What we still seek to understand is what we really are as conscious beings, what–as Einstein put it, “Are the thoughts of God,” the Intelligence or Consciousness “running the show,” — and which we can access within our own beings. How does this variable of consciousness, something that obviously exists, fit into the equations?  No equations have as yet been able to include the variable of consciousness. We still have a lot of work to do.  But one thing is certain:  As we look deeper and deeper, things are getting “curiouser and curiouser.” It is a very strange world we live in, and the ways that science and spirit will merge still elude our best minds.  But it seems logical to predict that they inevitably will come together in due course, and in an incredibly elegant and simple way—a true Theory of Everything.

This condensed book is about how we can begin to dig more deeply into Christianity, in a way that attempts to acknowledge, honor, and include the “truths” of science.  At the same time it honors, reviews and refines, and helps us understand that mystical forces that we can use to change our lives for the better. The book does so by beginning with four hypotheses:

1) If the Nazarene was in fact who we think he was, would it not be reasonable and logical that he was privy to the same conclusions, the same knowledge that even our most advanced scientists have reached? Might he and other enlightened beings like him have even understood more, and even made predictions about what we will come to know in the future?

2) The second hypothesis is that if the first hypothesis is correct, the most likely place that the teacher embedded this deeper knowledge was within the 30 highly enigmatic and curious parables—the often peculiar and enigmatic allegories, metaphors, which contain more than 1/3 of all the words he spoke that were recorded in the texts.  Obviously, they must have been of great importance to him because they are such a huge part of his teachings.  But they are so peculiar at times, so paradoxical and strange that parts of them can be a bit “swept under the rug” by some theologians. His native languages–he was likely multiligual–Hebrew, Aramaic, and probably some Greek, were by modern standards, relatively simple at that time,  lacking complex words that could explain certain highly advanced concepts.  So, the only way the teacher could communicate what he knew at the most advanced levels had to be done by metaphor and allegory.

But there is even more:  Additional critical knowledge was embedded by the teacher in the technique of “miracles” that the teacher wanted us to learn, and demonstrated not once, but two times for all to see—in the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, a “miracle” echoed in many other spiritual traditions, such as  Native American spirituality , Hinduism, and Buddhism etc.  To remind you, the teacher himself said, “And you shall do even greater works than these.” He was talking about you. And, this book will show you exactly where the “instructions” to this miracle are found.  And you will be surprised, perhaps reassured that they are in complete alignment with the very best contemporary self-help theories, and even the concepts from all the best mystical societies.  As it turns out, we are all using the same techniques but speaking about them in different ways.

3) The third hypothesis underlying the concepts within this book, and perhaps the teachers own “theory of everything,” is that the 30 parables were not delivered randomly, but rather in a highly intelligent, brilliantly orchestrated sequence of lessons designed to convey everything we need to know in order to live, and live well.

4) The final hypothesis is that the teacher’s knowledge was so advanced that even the best retranslations of the deep Greek words that were used in the original texts cannot entirely unravel the mysteries he wanted us to know.  As was said, it is only 2012 and we are only beginning to understand who we are, what we are, and what we can do within our universe to make our lives, and the lives of those around us better. What other interpretations of this great teacher’s mystical and very possibly scientifically compatible teachings will be made by someone else in another 10, 100, or 1000 years?  What lies ahead?  And is it reasonable to imagine that it will turn out to be completely congruent with, completely aligned with science?  For as we said, the truth is the truth, no matter from what angle it is approached.  Science and mysticism are at last beginning to merge.  And it is a beautiful thing to behold. And when it happens, rest assured: It will be simple, even…elegant. This is only a very meager start, but hopefully a step in the right direction. What great minds will be able to unravel and reconcile all of the “mysteries,” of both science and spirituality, in the future?  It is an exciting thing to think about. And what it all can do for you, as you seek to solve difficult problems, heal diseases and poor financial conditions, help your family members and other loved ones, do your part to help the country and world achieve peace and prosperity, and further your career is utterly amazing.  It will start with some more background that is essential to learn about so that you can get started in the right way.

This first part of the small book you currently have, will begin with a condensed summary of The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle, The Miracle Worker’s Handbook, now in a number of languages, in its fifth printing, and the recipient of the Nebulae Award for “Best Spiritual Book of the Year,  2005.”  This book has been read by thousands of people and feedback from readers indicates without a doubt that the principles within actually work, and work well.  That which may seem impossible, unsolvable, un-healable, or just downright hopeless, very well may be heal-able, solvable–and that there is hope. Give it a chance.  As you read you will see that the principles we will be working with are not new to you–you may already be an expert at some of them.  But putting them together in this precise way will give them the added kick, the power that you really need to change your life and your world in a hopeful, loving, successful, healthy, and positive way.

THE ORIGINAL ACCOUNT

Two Thousand Years Ago

It was late afternoon and darkness was not long in coming. The barren desert air was becoming chilly.  The huge crowd nonetheless refused to leave, to go back into the city to eat.  They were too fixated on the words of the great teacher they had trekked so far into the wilderness to see.  Men, women, and children included, there were perhaps six or seven thousand people.

It was not a good day for the teacher. Earlier that day he had learned that his mentor and friend, perhaps the only person on Earth he could truly confide in, John the Baptist, had been beheaded, simply to impress King Herod’s girlfriend.  He was grieving, no doubt in great pain, and in his grief had taken refuge in the wilderness, deep in the desert, as was his habit.  But though the day was full of fear, sadness, and an awful feeling in his heart, he still continued to perform his job.  He was a teacher and thousands of people had followed him into the desert to hear him speak. He was so strong that he could rise to the occasion.  That alone was a miracle:

For miracle workers do not cave in to tragedy or failure.

They transmute the negative into powerful, positive circumstances.

His assistants approached him and told him that the crowd was hungry, the darkness and cold of the night was approaching, and suggested that he release the crowd, so that they could go back into the cities to buy food for themselves.  But he did not agree, instead telling them to gather all the food that was available.  But everyone had already exhausted their supply of food during the long and no-doubt, spontaneous, unplanned trek deep into the desert.  No one had anything left, except for a small boy, who gave the disciples two fish and five loaves of bread he had somehow saved.

If you can imagine how big a crowd of many thousands really is in real life, you might imagine the attention that was now focused on the teacher as he held the two fish and the bread in his arms.  According to the standard accounts and translations, he lifted the food up, as if to Heaven, blessed it, and then gave it to the disciples, telling them to feed the crowd.  Of critical importance, is the fact that at this point the food had not yet expanded. It was still but two fish and five loaves. But, as it was divided and shared throughout the enormous crowd, something unexpected, but very quietly, seemingly naturally and effortlessly, happened.  The food expanded and expanded as it was broken up and passed along from one person to another. When the process was finished, the entire crowd had been fully fed.  So well, in fact, that many fragments of food remained on the ground.  The teacher asked the disciples to gather them up.  They did so, and the fragments filled exactly twelve baskets.

This is a “miracle” that is echoed in the traditions of Native Americans, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and countless other faiths:  The expansion of a small amount into a large, abundant amount.  It is not about food, however.  That is irrelevant. Rather it is a paradigm for the correction of lack of any kind using spiritual principles.

Two Thousand Years Later

A slight man, an obscure and very average ER physician, prone to thinking too much, with three enthusiastic golden retrievers and a backpack, wound his way on foot patiently up along the back, western side of the Indian Peaks mountains to the very top, the precise crest of the Continental Divide. He pitched his tent far above the million points of light of Denver and Boulder far below, looking to the East.  It was so beautiful,  humbling.  To the West the sun was setting over an infinitely receding series of blue into ever darker blue peaks. Night was coming and there was a coldness in the turbulent 12,000 foot air surging over the highest point in the continent.  He was hungry and needed water to prepare his camp food.

Looking about, he easily found a small glacier close by, made of packed snow, nestled into one of the crevices of the Eastern side of the steep slope.  He scooped up a tin pan of granulated snow and began to melt it using a small camp stove.  As he did so, he swirled the melting slurry around and around in the cup. But something very minor happened, almost unnoticeable.  A few drops of the melted water sloshed over the brim and landed on a sharp rock at his feet. He stood and contemplated this for a few moments. As was said, he sometimes thought about things a little bit too much.

Something unusual stuck him about the situation.  For, as he was perched exactly on the crest of the Continental Divide, the drops of water that landed on the Eastern Side of the rock would, in theory–if they did not evaporate–make their way inexorably to the creek below, and finally to the Rio Grande, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. By contrast, the drops that landed on the Western side of the rock would, by the same process, make their way down to the series of creeks at the bottom of the mountain, and eventually into the Pacific Ocean.  Such is the nature of the Continental Divide, the highest point in the country that divides the North American continent into two parts, two separate watersheds.

It’s funny but that is exactly like cause and effect is:  The difference in one step, one word, one decision, one thought form at the point of origin, can make a literal world of difference as the flow sweeps us downstream, inexorably amplifying our conscious intentions.

Although you may not yet realize it, you too are balanced on your own Continental Divide, every moment of your life.  Each second of your life, you step along a precipitous ridge, a knife-edge that divides your life into two entirely different potential dimensions.   On one side lies the world you most likely live in now, the world of ordinary struggle and uncertainty—a life of sometimes quiet desperation.  On the other side, stretching away in all its majesty, lies the world of self-empowerment—the world of self-creation—the dimension of the miraculous, where dreams unfold with natural precision.

Each moment as you walk this ridge that is your life, you make choices and decisions, and project intentions. Whether you are aware of it or not, each moment you choose to pour the water of your thoughts and intentions, your decisions, of one kind or another, down one side or the other.  You either choose to sow thoughts of uncertainty, doubt, conflict, and lack—or you choose to consciously sow thoughts of fulfillment, happiness, and ease—visions of intentional, positive creation.

In the most practical sense possible, you choose each second to remain either in the dimension of the ordinary, or to enter the dimension of the naturally miraculous.  And, as you continue walking the razor’s edge of your existence, the thoughts you sow flow down the sides of the great slopes of cause and effect, gaining momentum, snowballing, expanding, until they inevitably crest at the critical threshold of manifestation, and become the personal reality you experience around you.

Miracles are as yet poorly understood.  Often we think of them as events in which the laws of the universe, the laws of cause and effect are somehow circumvented. A “miracle” occurs when something “impossible” happens. We believe this about miraculous events only because we fail to understand the processes of cause and effect that enable them.  We are something like Neanderthals observing an eclipse of the Sun.  Because we lack the proper knowledge of cause and effect—just another name for “science”—we rationalize what we observe in peculiar, supernatural terms when, in fact, what transpires has an entirely natural explanation.

If you did not understand the scientific fundamentals of biology, for example, you would think the germination of a simple seed was somehow supernatural as well.  But we understand that for a seed to germinate, certain conditions must be present for that seed to germinate:  A viable seed, moisture, warmth, a soil matrix, oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, trace elements, alternating darkness and light, the proper pH, and time.  About twelve basic conditions, as fate would have it.

When all of these conditions are present simultaneously, the genetic, molecular information contained within the seed is activated, and its machinery set into motion.  Randomly distributed raw materials, molecules and atoms in the soil around the seed, are assimilated, then precisely organized into cellular components and membranes, cells, tissues, roots, and leaves. The seedling eventually matures into an entire plant or tree that can bear tremendous quantities of fruit, and many more seeds, which can then repeat the same sequence again.  And life goes on, and expands. The process is a “miracle” certainly—it is highly unlikely and fantastically complicated–yet it follows natural sequences of cause and effect.

Humanity is on the cusp of understanding the conditions, the principles of cause and effect that can lead to miracles—which we will define as “highly unlikely, even apparently ‘impossible’ beneficial events to occur, and can correct conditions of lack in every form, heal disease, heal relationships, and bring happiness and peace of mind to you and your loved ones.”  This book is about these conditions and how you can put them immediately into effect within your own life.

******

The account of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, arguably the most famous “miracle” ever enacted, was recorded many years after its enactment using the Greek language.  Although the teacher spoke Aramaic, less than 1% of university level scholars believe any of the gospels were written in Aramaic, but rather in Greek, the preferred written language of scholars at that point in history.

Consider: Greek words are from one of the oldest and most philosophical of all languages, and can thus contain a great deal of information.  A single word might have been passed along for centuries, used by a wide variety of philosophers, writers, and scholars, and thus have taken on a profound degree of depth.

Alas, translators of these original Greek texts that form what we now know as the Bible, seemed to often make a serious mistake.  They attempted to make every single Greek word, into a single English word. But, this is simply not possible. In uncoiling and unpacking all of the available information contained within the original Greek words, it is found that the Nazarene, and others like him who could correct lack in seemingly “miraculous” ways, did so by either consciously or unconsciously establishing twelve conditions. “Condition” is just another word for “cause,” as in “cause and effect,” and helps set up the environment in which a miracle–the effect–can occur. This information is found within the Greek words.

When simultaneously activated, these twelve “conditions” act like the combination to a great safe, opening it easily and naturally, unlocking the amazing treasures within.  The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle: The Miracle Worker’s Handbook, was written to unravel all the information about the miracle encoded in the Greek texts.  The book was picked up by a number of eclectic ministers and teachers, primarily from New Thought churches such as Unity, the Churches of Religious Science, and independent churches of the same ilk.

People seemed to like the new translations well enough, which revealed the “instructions” to the miracle, and they bought the books, but only in modest quantities. For, as fate would have it, the translator did not have nearly the means or the time it took to truly promote a book.  And so, the book spread “underground,” primarily by word of mouth.  As of this year, 2012, an estimated 50,000 copies have been read and shared, either in print or electronically. In time, The Miracle Worker’s Handbook, was very blessed to be translated into a number of languages.

In the everyday world we journey through, sometimes with great effort and considerable hidden angst, we are trying our very best to supply ourselves and our loved ones. Often, we experience “hunger;” hunger of all sorts, and want to know how to correct our own states of lack.  We are hungry for food, truth, affection, companionship, security, money, success, intimacy, happiness, health, and many other good things.  This hunger is a natural force that drives us to survive, to work, to produce, to learn, and hopefully to prosper, and should be honored for what it is. It is the force that causes life to exist and evolve.

The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle, The Miracle Worker’s Handbook, shows exactly how the Nazarene set up the twelve conditions to manifest a “miraculous” state of abundance.  These conditions are nothing new. Most of us already know about them and are working with them. They include obvious things such as generosity and giving, asking in the right way, visualizing, centering or grounding ourselves, and so forth. As they say, “There is nothing new under the Sun.” But having these twelve conditions grouped together succinctly and precisely in the way the teacher demonstrated, can provide help in concentrating on what really matters in your life, and help you accomplish the things you are trying to build, change, create, and heal.

This small booklet will present these conditions in a condensed and easily accessible form that you can carry with you, give away, and work with easily and cheaply.  It has been designed from the outset to be open-sourced, published and readable online for free, and distributed in these small booklets for only the bare cost of printing them and mailing them out.  No profit is ever to be made from these booklets, and bookstore owners are strenuously encouraged to “sell” this book at cost, with no mark up whatever.

*****

Encouraged by his modicum of success in retranslating The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle, the author had an unusual experience in which he felt strongly “called” to now translate the thirty enigmatic parables of the Nazarene, in the same way unlocking the full meaning of each of the original Greek words.

These parables are important first of all, because they include over 1/3 of all the words of the teacher that were recorded in the Greek texts.  It is also interesting that they were delivered in a specific, chronological order, which has been agreed upon by all biblical scholars for many years

Because his native tongue, Aramaic, was a relatively basic agrarian kind of language, without a great number of complex scientific or metaphysical words, the Nazarene had to resort to the use of parables and metaphors.  When the disciples asked him why he had started to teach in this new metaphorical way, his answer was, “Because it is for you to know the mysteries.”  Interestingly enough, quantum physicists use the same word.  They also call many of the complex and baffling conclusions they have arrived at, the “Great Quantum Mysteries.”

The primary point to realize, in this introduction to the parables, is that these mysteries are not merely interesting and thought-provoking, but of extreme utilitarian value for seekers of the Truth, those who want to raise their consciousness, and for learning “miracle workers” who seek to learn how to better their own and other’s lives with spiritual principles.  Moreover, if you know how to look for these scientific truths in the parables, clear evidence of them can be found.  The Nazarene was apparently far more intelligent and knowledgeable than we can ever imagine with our own normally graced intellects.  But we can try to learn as much as we can from him, look as deeply and open-mindedly as we can, and use this knowledge in very practical and beneficial ways even now.

One critical piece of information that will help with this unification process–between science and spirituality–is that a recent poll of about a thousand of the most respected physicists indicated that 80% of them have now accepted as “fact” that there are an infinite number of universes, and that [and this is a direct quote from the May 2003, issue of Scientific American]

“Every time a conscious being makes a decision, a new universe is formed…

Everything that can be possible becomes a reality in a Universe somewhere.”

This scientific “fact,” or at the very least principle, helps provide some of the answers for the mysteries we encounter as we approach the infinitesimal particles we are studying, and the quantum mysteries they bring with them–as well as the spiritual mysteries of life.  As is often said, “God works in mysterious ways.”

Though these mysteries are most daunting, a man came along who believed he had found the answer, or at least part of it, that resolved many of the mysteries. Proposed first in the extremely controversial doctoral thesis of the Princeton physicist Hugh Everett III, the idea of infinite universes, called the “Many Worlds Hypothesis,” is a very important piece of the puzzle. It is an extremely important process that any miracle worker should understand and use on a regular basis.  And there is not a person on Earth that cannot, with the right effort and persistence, and cooperation with Divine Intelligence, be self-empowered to be their own miracle worker. That, in a nutshell, was what the Nazarene was trying to tell us, show us, and demonstrate to us when he said:  “And you will do even greater works than these.” He wanted us to be “miracle workers,” and this book may help convince you that he tried his best to show you become one.

It could be argued that the series of thirty parables is the greatest legacy left to us by the teacher.  Because over 1/3 of all his recorded words were delivered within the context of the parables, they must have been of enormous importance to him. But it must be emphasized at the outset than these, or any other new translations, only scratch the surface of these deep lessons.  It may be centuries before we know the true depth, or true meaning of these enigmatic and complex metaphors. The translator was always left with the frustrating feeling that he could never understand the full meaning of the Greek words in which the parables were finally recorded centuries after the teacher’s death—nor the depth and breadth of the sometimes complex and perplexing lessons hidden within them.  The Hidden Parables, the third book published by the author in Tarcher/Penguin, New York, is a somewhat long and difficult book to read. This pocket-book condensation is an attempt to put the principles of the parables into a far more simplified and easily assimilated form–a booklet that can be read in an afternoon, and carried with you to help you recall and contemplate the truths the master wanted you to know.  If you want to know more, you can find the Hidden Parables on Amazon.com.  Although the publisher originally priced the hard-cover at about $27, used copies of the soft cover editions can be found for a few dollars.

This condensation of the Twelve Conditions and the Hidden Parables, is not written to make any money whatsoever.  They do not “belong” to the translator or to anyone.  They are for all people to freely access. In fact, this book will be published online, free for anyone to read.  The small booklets will be produced and maintained solely by donations of conscious people who want to do the right thing and help the process.  They will be either given away or distributed for free or for one dollar–to cover modest shipping and handling–never any more.  The condensed booklet is a sincere attempt to make these principles accessible to all people everywhere.

If an individual cannot afford even the modest shipping charges for the booklet, the foundation will be designed to help these people have a copy mailed to them regardless.  It is suggested that if you read this book and find it valuable, that you consider sharing it with another, or making a donation to the foundation, which will use every penny only for the purpose of making the booklet available to other people everywhere.  In time, we will have it translated into Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Hebrew, and other languages with the help of generous translators who will surely manifest with the passage of time.  As of April 2012, some translators already have appeared.

The knowledge conveyed by the teacher can change your life in a very powerful way.  The way it can do this is by changing the way that you think, and thus the way that you act.  And when you start acting in a way that is in alignment with the Twelve Conditions of a Miracle, and the thirty sequential parables, you will come to find that the legacy the master left is a gift to you, a gift of true “wealth,” your birth right, and a powerful element of your destiny.

This man was far more intelligent than he has been portrayed by some, far more relaxed and forgiving, far more friendly and kind—a person never to be feared, only to be trusted, respected, and loved.  He was a being that had as his only intent, to comfort and relieve the suffering of humankind, and bring to us great inspiration, strength, hope, and self-empowerment, so that we can reach our highest potential with the individual gifts each of us has been given.

The Twelve Conditions of a Miracle:

The Miracle Worker’s Handbook.

The First Condition:  Emptiness

“And hearing, Jesus withdrew from there in a boat into a desert place privately.

And having heard, a crown followed him on foot from the cities.”

At first glance, the first sentence of the account of the miracle seems to be nothing more than a mere introductory phrase that says, “Before the important events took place, the teacher heard something and traveled into the desert.  A crowd followed him on foot.”  This would seem to offer no information on how the miracle was performed and might be overlooked.  However, by looking closely at the original Greek words of the passage, and unpacking all of the information held within them, we can easily see that this is not the case.  The instructions are as clear as day.

To begin, think about it:  What is a desert really?  It is an empty place, a place devoid of any resources, a place with no food, no water, no shelter, and no significant vegetation.  More importantly, a desert is a place that has no politics, no arguments, no books, no words, and no sound—only silence—ideal for meditating.  For thousands of years, wise men and women have retreated into such desolate places in order to find peace and quiet, so that they can pray, meditate, and steady their minds so that they can hear the still small voice of God, and so receive the information they need to proceed.  A “desert” or “empty place” is in essence, a kind of vacuum.

A vacuum is a very special situation.  Because it is completely empty, it possesses the tremendous potential to be filled.  Like a magnet, a vacuum exerts a force that pulls things towards it.  As the saying goes, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”  It is an unbalanced situation and via Newton’s Laws, nature immediately mobilizes to fill this vacuum.  If you are in the middle of a vacuum what would you observe?  Things of all kinds rushing in towards you.  To wit, in going into the desert, the teacher automatically attracted a huge number of people to follow him.

Using the original Greek, let’s take a close look at what the passage really says.  The Greek words, transliterated from the original texts are,

Iisous anechorisen ekeithen en ploio

eis eremon topn kat idian.

* Iisous is the the Greek name for Jesus.

* Anechorisen can mean “to depart” as the normal translations indicate.  But any good Greek to English dictionary—And the ones in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, the ultimate authoritative reference admired and acknowledged by all Christians including Fundamentalists, Protestants, Catholics, and all the rest–will also tell you that it can mean “to withdraw the self.”  If we were to go one step further and substitute the modern, accurate psychological term for “self,” we would use the word “ego.”

* Topon can refer simply to “a place,” this is true.  But it is also true that it can be used to refer to a “condition” or “opportunity,” – in other words, “a place of potential.”

* Kat has only one meaning, and that is “down.” Curiously, all traditional translations completely leave this word out.  Why?  Because it didn’t “fit” their interpretations—just more evidence that they may be incorrect in many other instances.

* Eremon can refer to a desert, this is true, but can also be used to indicate more generically, “an empty or solitary place.”

* Idian can be translated as privately, but can also be translated as “pertaining to the self.”

Using this fairly straightforward information, all obtained from an impeccable reference, we can make a perfectly good argument that the passage really says, “Jesus heard about something significant, and went away into the desert alone.  There he withdrew his ‘self’ and went down, into a state of emptiness and inner stillness—into a place or ‘condition’ of potential.”

What was he doing?  Obviously, he was meditating.  And what more appropriate way would there be to prepare for something “miraculous?” It is also interesting to note that he did not go into the silent, deserted place, before and during the miracle, but afterwards as well.  When it was all over, he went again, alone, into another part of the desert to recharge himself, as it were, with the time proven method of meditation.  He started from a place of emptiness and returned to a place of emptiness, thus completing a circular cycle.

For a miracle worker, the conditions of a miracle are sequenced like the chambers and mechanisms of a powerful engine: They move through a series of cycles such that they end up with everything recharged and primed for another stroke of power and energy, another stroke of genius.  The entire Universe operates in a vast and interlocked various of cycles, from the orbiting of electrons, the metabolic cycles within our cells,  the rotation and revolution of the Earth and seasons, to the rotation of the galaxy– even through the cycles of the creation of the Universe itself and what scientists do not yet know will be the end of the cycle.  The conditions of a miracle move with the flow, and in so doing harness its extraordinary power for the good.

“And having heard…” Although accounts of the miracle generally fail to mention this, it is of paramount importance to understand what it was that the Nazarene heard to compel him to trek deep into a place of emptiness and silence.  As mentioned, he heard was that his only real peer–perhaps his only real confidant and teacher on this Earth, John the Baptist–had had been beheaded, and his head brought to the palace of King Herod in order to impress his girlfriend.

How would any person feel after hearing such a thing?  And the teacher was, after all, a man—part of the entire point of his coming here in the first place.  Undoubtedly he felt an intense grief, overwhelming sadness, discouragement, doubt, and probably no small degree of fear.  In his profound loss, he felt emptiness like all grieving people.

But miracle workers do not cave in to loss.  They get moving.  In essence, they transmute that which is undesirable or downright horrible, into that which is amazing and beautiful.  In physics, the bigger the vacuum, the more power it has to attract things into it to fill it.  And what, in the historical life of Jesus could have made him feel emptier than the sudden and utterly senseless death of his very best comrade?  But like all miracle workers, including yourself, he used this emptiness to create what could be argued is the most famous and amazing of all his miracles, the correction of the lack of over 5000 people.

When you stop to think about it, what better way would there logically be to prime oneself for the enactment of a miracle but to meditate and center the self, to empty it of thoughts, so that the still small voice can be accessed, and the critical information from it assimilated and used?

Activating the First Condition:

1) Walk. Or run, or exercise in some way.  Stepping back and looking at the miracle, every single recipient of the abundance that was manifested, and the miracle worker himself, walked “on foot” a very long way before the miracle occurred.  The human being, if carefully considered, is about 2/3’s devoted to the process of ambulation.  When we do not walk, when we do not use our bodies as they were intended, we block the flow.  Walking creates a kind of emptiness or vacuum at the cellular, the metabolic level.  During walking, or other forms of exercise, oxygen is used. More is automatically pulled in.

2) Unblock the flow.  In the original book from which this condensation was derived, a long allegory is told about a farmer who experienced a drought.  In order to deal with the lack of water, he acted out of fear and began to hoard the water flowing in the stream that wound through his lands, by erecting a damn and holding the water in a pond. He initially felt secure.

But water, or any kind of natural flow, always will find a way to continue.  In the story, the water created new channels that ran completely around the farmer’s lands, in order to reestablish the flow.  The farmer was left with a stagnating and evaporating swamp.  He saw a wise man who told him to “break down the damn, both within the stream and within himself.”

Although this did not seem to make any sense, he followed the advice, destroyed the damn, and lo and behold, the water once again began to flow back into its usual channels.  In a seemingly coincidental stroke of good fortune, the rains then started up again, and all was well.

Edgar Cayce, almost without a doubt the most well-studied and well-documented “psychic” in history, who healed many thousands of people, did not heal only their bodies and their diseases.  Transcripts of his readings indicated that thousands of people approached him who were in financial or other forms of material lack. Almost invariably, his advice centered around one critical principle:  That if a person was experiencing a blockage of financial flow, then they had to restart the flow by giving away some money.  He told people to very consciously and carefully make decisions on where to give and to whom to give, and then to release some of their material wealth, preferably in an anonymous way, and preferably in a way that made them happy.

Entire books are written about this well known phenomena. And it can hardly be argued by anyone in the know, that like follows like.  That generous giving, under the right circumstances—which will be elaborated upon in Condition Five—brings generosity from the Universe, and often in ten or one hundred fold to the giver.

Many people might argue that they will give, but that they cannot to do so now.  That they will give once they have become more financially stable.  Big mistake. Right now, if you are having a blockage in your flow, examine all your “junk mail,” particularly that which is asking you to give to some charity.  Look around you on the media and Internet and find places where you can give exactly that which you are lacking.  If you are lacking money, give money, if you are lacking companionship then give some companionship to the  “little people” around you.  They may very well be larger than you!  If you are experiencing a lack of a car, make it a point to help people who are having their own difficulties in this area:  Give rides, help others get where they are going, or even help them to finance their own modest vehicle.

The amount you give is not that important—for now.  If you are really in big trouble, big debt, then start modestly with smaller gifts of $5 or $10. What matters is that you are conscious, and relieve the blockage, break down the damn, and start to release some of that which you are hoarding so fearfully and so tightly.  This almost invariably fails to start the energy moving again. When continued, and expanded, it can make you wealthy, and in the real way, not merely in the superficial way.

3) Meditate. Do exactly what the teacher did.  If you already know how, make it a point to actually meditate each and every day, going “down, into a place of inner stillness, a place of potential.”  In this way, you will synchronize your spirit and your being with the flow around it and start finding yourself automatically in the right place and at the right time.

4) Go to the desert. That’s right. In your own case, your own desert may be a special place in nature, in the country, or the forest, or near the ocean.  Do not say that you don’t have time. Make time. Do as the teacher did if you want this to work.  Try to stay overnight, and meditate while you are recharging in the beauty and quiet of your special place of solitude. Here, an inspiration, a “seed” of information may be given to you unexpectedly, even at some time after you have gone into your own wilderness.  This “seed” may be the inspiration for a book or invention, the solution to a problem, the clarity of an affirmation or visualization, or some other kind of idea that will bring about tremendous financial healing.

The Second Condition of a Miracle

Alignment

“And coming out [of his meditation], Jesus saw a great crowd and

was filled with pity towards them, and he healed the sick among them.”

What do you know about the power of the Universe?  You know that it can create billions of galaxies like our Milky Way, each 100,000 light years in diameter with billions of stars pouring forth unfathomable amounts of heat and light and radiation for many billions of years.  You know the power of a blizzard, a thunderstorm, a hurricane, the power of our Sun to heat the entire Earth for billions of years, and the power of nature to create creatures such as human beings, each with trillions of cells all acting in concert to produce the light of consciousness—along with many incredible inventions, works of art and music, and countless other great things.

What’s more, you have achieved a point of personal evolution where you know that if you could harness but the tiniest fraction of that power, that abundance, that “wealth,” that you could manifest any miracle, any good dream with perfect precision.  The second condition of a miracle will show you exactly how to harness part of this natural and infinite power. This is done so by a process known as alignment.

Alignment is analogous to what a sailor does with a sailboat.  The currents of the winds and water surging all around him are constantly changing, very difficult to predict, and utterly impossible to control.  But what the sailor can control is the way that he aligns his boat, its sails, rudder and rigging, to harness the surrounding currents of water and air, so that he can go forth with great power and speed and arrive at his desired destination efficiently.  Part of you knows that you are not meant to be a helpless “victim” of the great forces of nature, buffeted about helplessly by the economy, the government, the IRS, your boss, your company, and your society. Part of you knows that you were meant to soar gracefully like an eagle on the great currents that move about you. The next section of the translation shows that when the next thing that happened was that the teacher, who was in a state of deep meditation, “came out” of his deep state of concentration, and shifted his focus.  Instead of looking within, he now focused on those that were around him, on others.

The authors of the Greek texts chose a very interesting word to describe the exact nature of this shift from inner to outer focus:  esplanchyisthi. Although typically translated as “filled with pity,” there is something suspiciously codependent and condescending about this word “pity.”  In fact, closer examination of the translation indicates that this word actually means “moved with compassion.”  He did not merely feel compassion–there is another word for that.  Rather he was moved by his feeling of empathy when he saw the sick and hungry people gathered about him, there to search for truth, for light, and immediately got to work to do something about it.

Before you can harness the great currents of the Universe, it is vital that you know something about their nature.  What are the fundamental rules that govern the flow within this world?  The great minister Henry Ward Beecher once said quite succinctly, “Love is the river of life in this world.”  And what is compassion but love set into action?  We are living and working within a river, a gigantic overriding current of pure love.  Many of us already know this to be true intuitively.

So the task of a miracle worker is to learn how adjust the sails and rigging and rudder of his “boat” so that he is working with this current, and not across or against it.  The passage shows us that the teacher’s reflex reaction to the suffering, lack of understanding, and sickness he saw all around him was that of compassion.  Two of the parables are devoted to this very principle:  That if we are to be true followers, and do “even greater works than these,” as the teacher predicted, we have to develop and act upon a “reflex” of compassion.

The teacher’s reflex reaction to any situation in which he came in contact with suffering of any kind, was precisely like that of the Good Samaritan.  He did not merely feel pity.  He was moved with compassion, i.e. he was set into motion to actually do something to help.  In doing so, he configured his entire being to be in alignment with the great current of love that sweeps this entire Universe forwards towards its ultimate destination:  A state of complete unconditional love, acceptance, and an automatic desire to help every being.  In a kind of paradoxical way, selflessness is in your own best interests!

Imagine that you are in a tiny lifeboat, stranded on a distant sea.  You decide that your destination should be a tiny island in the distance.  It appears barren and devoid of life but you imagine it to be your only hope and make it your goal to get there. Imagine that this will be your salvation, and row with ever ounce of your strength towards it.  But you soon find that there is a problem.  The currents of the waves and winds are blowing against you.  The harder you row, the less you seem to gain.

Finally, you reach a state of acceptance, submission to the forces around you, and you let go of the oars.  The current then sweeps you swiftly in the other direction.  But lo and behold, before long another speck appears on the horizon.  As the current sweeps you surely towards it, you see that it, unlike your original goal, is an island teeming with life, food, and fresh water.  You end up much happier and safer than if you had attained your originally intended goal.

A man once had an analogous situation in life; he is a composite of many people observed within this real world.  He decides that he wants to build a house, his first house, on a very specific piece of land that he has chosen.  But no matter how hard he tries, everything seems to go wrong.  He cannot secure the title to the land, he can’t get a loan, and everything else goes wrong.  Finally, he gives up and accepts his situation.

Before long, however, he learns of another job in another city which he had never considered, takes the job, and this is from true stories–finds a house exactly like the one he had already dreamed of, a house with a huge tract of land, a lake laden with fish, a garden, and many beautiful trees.  He also learns that the location where he had originally planned to build was actually filled with corrupt people, and that if he had succeeded building his rather oddly planned house, he would have been stuck in that terrible place for years, never even being able to sell the now, by comparison, ridiculous house he had originally set his heart on.

And so it is with many other situations in life.  When we give up and accept, truly accept the situation we find ourselves within, the Universe, God, finds us a better place “miraculously,” and we end up being far happier than we had ever imagined.

Activating the Second Condition of a Miracle:

1) With the eyes of your spirit “see the multitudes”—become aware of the problems and concerns of others, rather than focusing on your own small self.  Pay attention to what is going on in the world around you.  And start small.  Start with those directly around you, your immediate family, the people in the offices and cubicles that surround you at work.  Then work outwards so that you become steadily aware of the problems and suffering of the “multitudes”—those in other lands far away.

2) Be filled with compassion; work at this until it is a part of your automatic, reflex character.  But under no circumstances limit yourself to merely feeling this compassion; make it also a reflex, an automatic and consistent habit, to act immediately to do something to help.  Pick up the phone, or go to a website that will help the suffering you see. Don’t just sit there. Do something. Even giving a tiny amount, perhaps $5 in good faith, is far, far better than doing nothing.  Remember the “Widow’s Mite.”  She was poor and had nothing but two tiny copper coins. But her gift was considered by God to be of far greater worth than the piles of gold the rich had given.  God is not so concerned about the amount that you give, as much as he is concerned with your evolving attitude, the true selflessness, concern, and generosity that you exhibit.  He, like a good parent, wants you to learn to be like him, to show evidence that you are getting the point, the lesson:  That you must be automatically moved with compassion.

When you act consistently in this way, even the tiniest kindness you show others is exactly analogous to a sailor making small but necessary adjustment to his sails and rigging. Reconfigure your mindset so that you are flowing with the currents around you as efficiently as possible.  Such is the mindset, the habits of a miracle worker, and is something you are perfectly capable of, and probably perfectly aware of already.

Whenever you seek to manifest or put into action the conditions of a miracle, always, always consider at the very outset, the effect your actions will have on the greater good, the big plan, the welfare of others and the world.  This will prime your mind; configure it such that it the same as a miracle worker, and you will begin to see real changes in your life.

The Third Condition of a Miracle.

Asking

And evening coming near, the disciples said to the teacher, this is a desert place, and the hour is late.

They asked him to send the crowd away that they might go into the cities and buy food for themselves.  But he said, “No, give them something to eat.”

In this part of the miracle that which was needed was clearly put into words and conveyed to the Source, the Teacher.  Most of us already know very well the importance of this process.  When we put into words exactly what we want, we set into motion the power of Spirit.  For as it is said, “Ask and it will be given unto you, knock and the door will be open.”  Later as you study the parables, you will find that this amazing spiritual promise from the teacher was actually part of a parable and had certain caveats, certain conditions attached to it, primarily generosity.

For now, as a learning miracle worker, consider rethinking and refreshing your process of putting into words that which you need and want. Remember that thinking is the first level of manifestation, speaking is the second, and putting your needs into writing the third level.  It is time now for you to make a new list.  The power of this is both inexplicable, quite the “quantum mystery,” and incredibly powerful.

But there are three critical to this process that are extraordinarily important, and which may go overlooked if you are not careful.  The first of these is to make absolutely sure that what you ask for is in complete alignment with what you see as the greater good, the Big Plan, that God has for this world.  Second, make sure that what you seek to manifest, will benefit not only you, but will benefit as many others as is possible. This adds enormous power to your process, and prevents the elements of selfishness and even narcissism that can develop in some people who engage in this kind of activity.  The disciples did not ask the teacher for food only for themselves, although there seems little doubt that they were amply fed during the process.  They asked the teacher to help the hungry masses.

Third, there is a school of thought that the best way to go about this process is to list as many specific things about what it is that you want as possible.  This will work.  However, it is not necessarily recommended as the best way to go about the process.  Let us consider this point for a few moments.:  The disciples did not ask for a specific kind of food, loaves of bread and fish, for the crowd.  Rather, they simply made it known, and put this into words, that the crowd was hungry.  They had a feeling, hunger, and needed a different feeling, “filled.”

How many of us have coveted some material object, a car or a house, or a sum of money, only to find that when we received this commodity, that after a short time we were no more happy than when we started?  In fact, it doesn’t take much thought to recall a few instances in which you or others received what you wanted only to find that you ended up miserable anyway.

This is why the third caveat to the asking process is to ask for the feelings you seek to have.  The only thing a human being ever has, in reality, is a series of feelings—the sum total of his or her perceptions, bodily sensations, emotional states, mental processes, and memories.  Because of this, seek not material objects or specific qualities of say, a companion or soul mate.  Instead, be wise and ask for the feelings you think what your desires will bring to you.  If you want a house–to make sure you don’t end up with one that brings with it all sorts of unforeseen problems, debts, difficult neighbors, anxiety, and other disturbances of your peace of mind—think of the feelings you want that house to bring to you: Security, fun, comfort, relaxation, a sense of beauty, peacefulness, safety, peace of mind, and in a short but unbeatable term, simple happiness.

The Fourth Condition of a Miracle

Maximizing

As the miracle continued to be primed, the next thing that happened is that the disciples gathered up the only food that they could find, five loaves of bread and two fish that a small boy had managed to save, the rest having been exhausted during the long, and probably unplanned day, and trek into the wilderness.  Although most of us would have simply given up at that point, the teacher did something completely differently.  He said, “Bring them to me.” The whole point illustrated here is that the loaves and fishes did not appear from nothingness.  They expanded from what was already present as it was used, and thus maximized to its greatest potential.

What this means for you, as you seek to better your own lives and the lives of those around you, it is almost certain that whatever it is that you want exists to some degree, perhaps an almost infinitesimal or “negligible” amount, already in your life.  It is your job to find that existing supply, and then use it to its very maximum, “as if”—and we will see this is elaborated upon in a separate condition—it were enough.

A lot of it has to do with simple gratitude, the way you look at things. As the popular and well phrased saying goes, “you can either look at life as a glass half empty, or a glass half full.”  Your point of view, your perception of the way things are is an enormous part of any miracle.

Activating the Fourth Condition

Examine your situation, and your perceived lack carefully.  Take a careful and thorough inventory of what it is that you already have.  Ask yourself with all the honesty you can muster, “Am I maximizing what I already have to the very maximum?” Or are you taking what you already have for granted.  Complacency may be a formative part of your perceived problem.  Look at all your existing talents if you want more, and make sure you are using what you have to the very best of your ability.  If you are unhealthy in some way, concentrate on the parts of your body that are healthy.

What you focus on expands. This will be repeated many times throughout this book, as well it should.  If you focus on the glass as half empty, it will shrink even more.  If you focus on the glass as half full, it will fill to overflowing abundance in due course.

The Fifth Condition of a Miracle

Giving

This is the shortest chapter in the book. This is because giving is so deeply embedded, so deeply, almost genetically integrated with the entire process of “miracles”  that it is generously covered in many areas of the book.  For the moment though realize this:

If you follow the energy as it flow of energy through the miracle you will see that it is a series of “givings.”  The child gives the existing supply to the disciples, the disciples give it to the teacher, the teacher “gives” it to God, God gives it back, the teacher gives it to the disciples, the disciples give it to the crowd, and the crowd gives it, shares it, passes it out to everyone present. And it expands.

Giving, and generosity, which is the feeling behind giving, and a direct manifestation of love, is perhaps the most well-known metaphysical technique for increasing one’s own supply.  Entire books have been written on this subject, and two of the parables are devoted to the nuances of this critical step.  In order to activate this process correctly, so that it actually works, however, certain precautions and measures need to be established and carefully maintained.

Activating the Fifth Condition of a Miracle.

1) Focus on the feeling behind the gift.  To be sure, the physical act of giving is a critical and absolutely essential part of the process.  Many people talk about giving, or think about it, or rest on their laurels and count on what they have already given to be sufficient to activate the process.  But there is only the present.  What will you give today?

But it is not the physical act of giving that actually is responsible for the miraculous processes of increase that can occur when this process, known from time immemorial, is activated.  It is the mental processes, the emotional mindset of the giver that “causes” the “effects” that occur.  As quantum physics has told us in the new Quantum World, it is thought, decisions that change the Universe, and can even gift birth to new and better worlds where the “impossible” can become “possible.”

Like attracts like.  Therefore the giving of a gift, in order to produce the proper effects, must imbue with the giver feelings of satisfaction, joy, and heartfelt enthusiasm about one’s self and one’s life. You will know that a gift is properly given if it produces within you these feelings.  If it does not, then you have to start again and give in a different way until you do feel these feelings.

2) Whenever possible, and this is not always achievable, remain anonymous.  When you remain anonymous, you are blocking any return from those around you who will perhaps think more highly of you because you have given such a large gift to your church or a charity.  When you block any return from others, with anonymity, or the closest you can come to it, you allow God to be the only source of your return.  And whom would you rather give you a gift in return?  The people you know, or the wealthiest and most generous being in the Universe?

3) Take care to attach no strings of any kind to your gift.  An effective, miraculous gift, has no conditions attached to it of any kind.  A gift which does, is a subtle manipulation of others.

4) Don’t neglect your microenvironment.  Sometimes people are deeply concerned about people dying in a foreign land, but neglect the people closest to them in their lives.  Some of the greatest gifts you can give are simple attention, simply spending time with someone who loves you or looks up to you.  Stay low-profile when you do this, and do not ever talk about what you are doing or why.  Giving should be only between you and God.

5) Give the gift of listening.  Sometimes we think that we are giving when we are talking to someone and telling them about what we think is important information they need to know.  In actuality, in many cases, talking is taking–taking up someone’s time and attention.  When you ask how others are feeling, and are quiet, letting them speak, you are giving them a great gift, of sincere attention, and love.  In addition, you might learn something. Much of a miracle is often information. I have personally had experiences in which I tried to be more quiet and listen, and in the process learned something extremely valuable.  Many others have told me the same thing.  Some of their stories are obviously miraculous.  Listen and prosper.

The Sixth Condition of a Miracle

Grounding

The next think that transpires during the miracle is curious.  As was mentioned, this miracle, the feeding of a large crowd with only a small amount of food was demonstrated not once but twice.  And on both occasions, directly before the proliferation occurred the teacher asked everyone to “sit down on the grass.”  If you stop to think about it, this is most curious because in the desert in that part of the world, there is no grass—scarcely any vegetation of any kind.  Therefore, either the translation is flawed, or there is a metaphorical interpretation required—or both.

The Greek word for “sit down on the grass” are anaklithinai epi tou chortou. When carefully examined, these words can also be used to mean “recline in the garden.”  So, if we use a metaphorical interpretation, the question is, “what does the teacher refer to when he uses the term “garden.”  In all of Biblical scholarship, the most common and obvious metaphorical meaning of the word “garden,” obviously refers to the Garden of Eden.  This, in turn, is a metaphor for the state that a person is in, before he or she starts to think about things in terms of good and evil. i.e. before judgmental thinking enters in.  It is a state of complete innocence, childlike purity—a state of complete relaxation, confidence, a state where there is a complete absence of anxiety, worry, or shame.  It is also a state in which what is all around is perceived as perfect, a state of complete and absolute abundance.

How precisely does a person go about reaching such a state?  It is called “grounding.”  When we are perfectly grounded, we are in a state where what we already have is perfect just as it is, and we are in a state in which we are poised to receive a large flow of energy.

Energy, money, resources of all kinds flow, from person to person, from country to country, in a way exactly analogous to the way water or electricity flows.  Water always flows to the lowest point, the most grounded point.  Think about electricity, the way it flows, and what it means to be electrically grounded. If you are in the basement, stand on a wooden stool in rubber boots, and stick your finger into the light socket (do NOT try this at home, for goodness sake), you will not experience a flow of electricity through your body.  The electricity has nowhere to go, because you are completely insulated from the ground.  Now, if you take your shoes and socks off, put a little water on the concrete floor and stick your finger in the light socket, the flow of electricity through your body will be so powerful that it very well may kill you.  This is because in this state, you are perfectly grounded.

This is related to the principle of emptiness, the principle of a vacuum which was spoken of in the First Condition.  The Earth, has a complete lack of concentrated electrons.  When connected to a source of concentrated electrons, such as an electrical circuit in your house, the electrons have a place to go—they move powerfully into the relatively “empty” place of the Earth, the ground. And so it is all through nature, society, economics–everything:  Wherever there is much, it automatically, according to Newton’s Laws, flows outward into whatever is emtpy.  Supply and demand works this way.  Knowledge works this way:  knowledge flows from the teacher who has a great deal, to the students who lack the knowledge.  If there is concentrated energy, such as heat in a cup of coffee, it will naturally diffuse outwards warming the air around it until both are the same temperature.  So, the teacher, to prepare the crowd to receive a flow of supply, had them ground themselves, by relaxing into a state absent of knowledge, judgment, anxiety, shame, or guilt—a state of groundedness.

Activating the Sixth Condition of a Miracle:

1)  The time proven, cross-culturally validated way of grounding, is to get into the present moment and stay centered within it as much as possible.  This can be established through meditation, but can also be established by practicing being in the moment, being aware of the moment, as you do everything, anything in your daily life.  Of particular help are many extracurricular and “right brained” activities, such as music, art, playing with pets or children, sports, and all manner of happy, relaxing activities.  Other times ideal for practicing being conscious in the moment, and thus become increasingly grounded and ready to receive the flow, are waiting in line at the store, driving or waiting in traffic, and other areas of “down time” you would otherwise waste being bored or aggravated.

2) Become as a child.  We are told distinctly in no uncertain terms by the teacher elsewhere that unless we can “become as children, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven” i.e. reach the state of abundance and fulfillment in all levels that we seek to achieve.  Playing with children, or letting yourself loosen up and play like children is a great way of doing this. Spending quality time consciously with your sweetheart and/or family are great ways to do this as well.  Personally, I highly recommend dogs, and believe they evolved along with human beings for all of our history.  Some have a theory that if you do not have a dog in your life, or at least make it a point to spend some time with a dog now and then, part of your neurological system will not be activated to its full potential.  This subject is actually addressed specifically in one of the Parables.

3) Ground out physically.  I know that this may sound entirely irrelevant, but ask any good energy healer and he or she will confirm this.  Take off your shoes and come in contact with the Earth.  Swimming, even taking long baths or steam baths/sweat lodges are ways of powerfully and completely  grounding the electrical systems and meridians of the body.  Apparently, according to the teacher, for some reason, this is necessary to get where we are trying to go.  I’m just the messenger, but it does seem to make sense.

The Seventh Condition of a Miracle

Visualization

After the teacher is given the loaves of bread and fish by the disciples, the scriptures say that he “looks up to Heaven.” “Looking up to Heaven” is described in the original texts by two Greek words, anavlepsas, and ouranon. Strictly speaking anavlepsas can mean merely to “look,” but it can also mean, “to restore vision.”  Ouranon can be translated merely as “heaven,” but it can also refer to “happiness,” or “power.”  Key to the definition, according to Strong’s Concordance, is the idea of “elevation.” In plain English, this phrase is best and most completely translated as “restored and elevated his vision, to a happy, powerful state, a state in which he could see Heaven.”  We now refer to this common process as “visualization,” and most of us are working with it already.  But, we can always learn more.

In visualization, we may be confronted with one thing in the “real world” – such as a gigantic crowd that only has to fish and five loaves to eat, but we use the power of our minds, as human beings, sons and daughters of the Creator, to “elevate and restore our vision,” so that we see something higher, something better.  We know that the teacher was doing this for sure, that he was seeing the crowd as abundantly fed, because of the way that he acted shortly thereafter—human beings always conceive how they will act before they act, always see in their mind’s eye what they will invent or create before they execute their invention or creation.

In the very same way, we as miracle workers have a daunting, and very challenging task, a task a responsibility to see something better, no matter how impossible it may feel to do so., and that is that no matter what our eyes and ears and other senses tell us is the “truth” about what is happening, we are required to force ourselves, if necessary, to take the time and energy necessary to see something higher, something better.  If we are told one of our family members has an invariably lethal form of cancer and that the advanced and highly scientific tests and statistics, such as MRI and lab tests, and journal literature of the subject show this to be absolutely “true” – we, if asked to help heal that person, have to “see” them as whole and well anyway.

Many of us miracle workers and I don’t know a single one that is perfect in this regard at all times, can neglect to do this, particularly when a situation is especially vivid, “certain,” and “undeniable.”  This last word was carefully chosen because visualizing, especially during a terrible tragedy or situation, could use this as a form of denial.  And yet, even knowing that, acknowledging that, we are still required to see something better, no matter what is happening, no matter how bad things have gotten.  We are not sure how this works in our quantum world, but we do know that it does tend to work.

Activating the Seventh Condition of a Miracle

1)  Always begin by reviewing the written work you did while activating condition number three.  In this step you will “restore” your vision, refresh it, and redesign it so that you can really see it as already real, as something which has already come to pass. And don’t forget, concentrate of what it is that you want to end up feeling from in your new and improved life.

2) Don’t limit your “vision” to the sense of sight.  True we are primarily visual beings, but the most effective kind of visualization often includes all of the senses.

3) Keep it simple, and keep it going.  If a person is very ill, perhaps simply see them as running and playing with you in a perfectly healthy and happy manner–which automatically subsumes that they are completely healthy.  And keep it going, this is not something you do once and then forget about.  Far from it, some people will burn cassettes or CDs, or write down their vision for a better life.  They will then review this on a daily basis, or even more than once per day.

The most potent times for doing this, by the way, according to experts on the subconscious mind, are just as you are drifting off to sleep, and just after you have awakened in the morning. But other times that can be used are like the times mentioned for practicing grounding.  In fact you can practice grounding in the present and visualizing at the same time.  While you are “wasting” time–standing in line, waiting in traffic or driving, etc., practice visualizing what it is you seek to feel in your improved life i.e practice feeling how you will want to feel, imagine how you will feel.  Practice makes perfect.

Use your imagination, the fantastically complex part of the mind that can synthesize images of things that have not already come to pass, that you are feeling these feelings now, in the present. Remember that like attracts like.  So, if you want to be happy, practice feeling happy, or at least practice seeing or imagining how you will feel when you are happy and imagine that this is now.  The old maxim, fake it until you can make it is a perfect truth to remember when times are especially rough.  Yep, even faking it is far, far better than indulging in negative thought forms.

The Eighth Condition of a Miracle

Gratitude

The Greek word used here evlogise, and is normally translated as “blessed.”  In other words, after he “restores and elevates his vision,” the teacher then blesses the bread.  This word comes from two Greek words eu, which means good, and the core concept logos, which has such a depth of meaning that many pages, perhaps a book could be written on it.  Our modern word “eulogy,” comes directly from this word, and is now used primarily to refer to a speech about the good things, the good points about a person after their passing. The point, for the time being, is that rather than say, “Oh darn, this is a pitiful amount of food,” he instead said good words about it.  Probably something to the effect that he was extremely grateful for what he had in hand, and that it was perfect and terrific just the way it was.

In the same way, if you believe you need a new car, take great care to speak only kind words about what you have now.  Don’t call your car a “piece of junk,” your job as “a joke, a waste of time,” or say anything negative, feel anything negative about any resource with which you have already been supplied.  This is a “luxury” you absolutely cannot afford.  It poisons the conditions of a miracle.  And it gives you nothing in return.

Gratitude is so powerful, that if alone practiced perfectly, can bring you to a state of perfect abundance, perfect oneness. For if you had perfect gratitude, you would be absolutely stunned by the miraculous nature of your body, your family, your friends, your country, and the utterly amazing characteristics of nature, astronomy, biology, and other kinds of science.  You would be back in the “garden” lacking nothing and with perfect happiness, confidence, and grace.

Activating the Eight Condition:

1) Take an inventory, again, of all your blessings.  Then actually speak, say as many good things as you can about them.  Don’t wait for things to be grateful for, proactively look for them.

2) Shift your mindset from one of jaded complacency and discontent, to one of childlike wonder and amazement. As A Course in Miracles makes clear, when you shift your perception, your reality will shift.

3) Never let a single negative word slip from your lips.  If we are honest with ourselves, we sometimes like to complain.  It makes us feel superior, impressing others with our woes, as though we will make others feel sorry for us and give us breaks. Whining makes us feel part of the crowd.

4) Follow this critical rule:  When things are going well, say many good things.

When things are not going so well, say twice as many good things.

The Ninth Condition of a Miracle

Acting As If

Remember that in the introduction we talked about the fact that the propagation of the food did not take place until the food was passed out.  At this point in the miracle the food was as yet, still a very small amount.  And yet the teacher, the demonstrator, acted as if it was sufficient.  He began to pass it out and the crowd passed baskets of the broken bread and the fishes around to each other. As they did so, the expansion, the miracle finally precipitated.

The 1st part of a miracle is conceiving it.  The 2nd part is speaking of it.  The 3rd part is writing it down, putting it into words.  The 4th part.  The final level is acting, acting in a way as if things are the way you have conceived them, hand in hand with the Creator.

This part involves a real leap in faith.  For if you fail, you may appear to fall flat on your face.  But miracle workers, and all successful people are well known to be reasonable “risk takers.”  In this condition, you will make the leap of faith and start acting as if the miraculous had already taken place.

Activating the Ninth Condition

1) Act. Work. Do everything you can possibly think of to help advance your cause.  Why do you think they call them miracle workers? God helps those that help themselves.  And work is highly underrated sometimes by metaphysicians—it seems dull and unmagical. But there is hardly anything wrong with hard work.  As Einstein said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”  Look at what the miracle worker was doing on that special day.  Even though he was experiencing intense grief, he saw that there were many people to heal and set about to heal as many of them as he could. Apparently he worked at this steadily until it started to become dark. It seemed that he was always doing this kind of thing.  He was a carpenter.  I was a carpenter for a while in my younger years and it was without a doubt the hardest job, physically, I have ever had.  The Nazarene was a naturally hard worker.    He was always teaching and healing, hardly a lazy person.

2) As you work, as you act, refuse to let any process of delay surprise or deter you.  Expect a miracle, as they say, but expect it to unfold in its own time. Persistence is one of the most powerful characteristics of all successful miracle workers.  Look at Mother Theresa.   She was responsible for healing and feeding hundreds of thousands of people and her work is still going on, after her death.  She persisted, no matter what failures she experienced and in her persistence she overcame and succeeded.  And her journals and diaries reveal that she was very often exhausted, frustrated, angry with God, and felt a failure.  But she persisted.  Such is the hallmark of a saint.

3) Learn how to deal with inertia, laziness, and the inability to start things.  Do this by breaking down the very first steps into small increments.  First, set aside a special period of time when you know that you will have the time and energy to accomplish what you need to do.  Don’t try to do things when you are exhausted or at a low energy point. For example, if you want to write a book, but can’t start, set aside a time when you know that you will have plenty of time, and arrange to have complete uninterrupted solitude.  Then, resolve to at least sit down in from of your laptop.  Then, resolve to put your fingers on the keys.   Then, write the first sentence.  Then the first paragraph, the first page, and eventually the first chapter.

If you want to start exercising, start by arranging and setting out your exercise clothes in advance the night before.  Surprisingly, even that can seem daunting to some. Think carefully and set aside a high energy point to start.  Then put your shoes and clothes on.  Then, step out the door, walk down to the street, turn around and go back home.  That is something anyone can do. The next day repeat the process, and begin expanding, walking a little more everyday. Starting is about half the process.  And don’t forget:  In all things problematic, literally take the time to sit down and ask Spirit to help you.  It will.

The Tenth Condition of a Miracle

Engaging the Cycle

Remember that if you follow the flow of energy in the miracle, that it follows a circular flow. The teacher himself exhibited a full circle sequence. He started with solitude and meditation, and when he was finished, returned to the solitude of the desert to meditate. Cycles of energy can be observed in the subatomic motion of electrons orbiting the nuclei of atoms, to the metabolic cycle of the body like the “Kreb’s cycle,” and our reproductive cycles.  Cycles can be observed throughout the world, and throughout the astronomical realm. They are everywhere.   Your job is to find the cycle or cycles that pertain to your projects and goals, then to align with them.  You will then be working with the flow.  It may require thought and energy.  Everything worth doing does.  When you align with these cycles you align yourself with the flow of energy—it is like putting the wind at your back—you gain tremendous energy from this.

In the miracle, the small boy gave the disciples his food, the disciples gave it to the teacher, the teacher “gave” it to God, God “gave it back,” the teacher gave it to the disciples, the disciples to the crowd and the crowd to each other.  At the end, the fragments were gathered up to complete the cycle.

Activating the Tenth Condition of a Miracle

1) As energy, resources, and ideas pass through your life, actively look for and keep the energy going.  Don’t be the deadbeat at work, the weak link in the chain.

2) Be an excellent team player.  The Universe operates, in a way, like a championship basketball team.  No one hogs the ball.  It is constantly being passed around quickly and efficiently.  In your life, no matter what comes into your job or relationship or organization, don’t drop the ball.  Make sure that you keep the energy going.  Consistently be the responsible one, the one that everyone can count on to keep the energy going and do the job.  What do they call such people?  They call them “the boss” or the “CEO.”

3) Remember that growth occurs in cycles.  If you look at the largest tree in the forest, and observe its growth rings if it has been cut down, you will see that some years or series of years exhibited great growth–those are the wide rings.  At other times, the growth rings will be small, perhaps when there were years of drought.

When the tide goes out and nothing seems to happen, don’t panic. Be like the owner of a great ship.  When the tide goes out, there is access to the bottom of the hull, and time to repair it.  Don’t go into an apathetic slump. Take advantage of the low flow of energy. Use the extra time you have to perhaps stream line your life, your home, your garage, your attic. Sort, simplify and recycle the resources you don’t use.  Then, when the energy returns, and it always does, you will be in a position to act with greater efficiency and power.

If you are in a slump and nothing seems to be happening, streamline.  Go through everything, every room, every closet and find where the things you do not use can go.  Ridding your life of clutter, accumulated junk, and other things that weigh you down is a perfect thing to do when you are in a low energy cycle.  Use that part of the cycle and before long, things will pick right back up again, this time even stronger than before.

The Eleventh Condition of a Miracle

Receiving

A beautiful story is told in the book of Kings in which the profit Elisha is approached by a woman whose husband recently died.  She is desperate and needs wisdom.  She has been left with a mountain of deft, and her creditors are swarming around her, threatening to take her very sons as slaves, as collateral, if she cannot pay. Elisha asks the woman if she has any assets at all. Remember, that in a miracle, the expansion occurs starting with that which is already on hand—it is the “seed” from which the miracle can grow.

The woman replies that she has but a single jar of oil, a commodity of value back in those days.  The great wise man instructs the woman to collect as many empty jars as she possibly can. “Go into your house and pour the oil in your full vessel into the empty jars you have collected.”  Although she no doubt wonders why, she follows the instructions and in doing so experiences a great miracle of proliferation.  As she fill the first empty jar, there is still oil left.  So she fills the second empty jar, a third, a fourth, until she is left with a huge amount of oil, of wealth, enough to pay her debts and save her family.

Long ago when I was in premed, I had a mentor who was a very wealthy and successful internist.  He kept saying to me in a joking voice, “The secret to success is big pockets, my boy,” while putting his hand into the large pocket of his white coat.  I did not understand at the time, but he was trying to tell me something. We often say to ourselves that receiving is the part of a miracle with which we will have the very least problem.  But the fact is that so many of us do not feel as if we are worthy of receiving a great abundance.  Or, we fail to see it when it is presented to us. In reality, it can be as much of the problem as any other.  Don’t take it lightly.  Are you really ready to receive?  Do you feel way down deep inside your heart that you are worthy to receive?  If you don’t, the flow is blocked.

When I first moved to my dream location of Colorado and was looking for hospitals with good emergency room jobs, a particular recruiter kept calling me and bothering me, asking me to work at this one hospital. Jobs were hard to find at that time, and so were good hospitals.  But I resisted. Why? In retrospect, it was so stupid.  It was because I didn’t like her “pushy” attitude in trying to convince me to work there. So I ignored her deciding that if she was so insistent, there must be something wrong with that hospital.

I ended up working for several years in a series of hospitals that had very difficult shifts, and sometimes very cranky, difficult people to work with.  But one day, out of desperation because I couldn’t find enough shifts to fill a certain month, I accepted the invitation and worked at the first offered hospital.  I loved it.  It was perfect.  In fact, it was so great that I ended up working there for many happy years. It was the best place I ever worked.

Another woman I knew lived in Puget Sound.  She worked hard for years, affirming and visualizing finding a partner of a certain kind, with a certain kind of house and job and personality.  She eventually found the man who was exactly what she was looking for.  But after a while she became complacent and took her situation for granted. She admitted it to me.  She hadn’t been living the dream, wasn’t appreciating it for what it was.  And so, it gradually dissipated back into the realm of the unmanifest, and her dream was gone.

Activating the Eleventh Condition of a Miracle

1) Eat and be filled, like the crowd.  As your dream unfolds helping you and many others around you, make absolutely certain to thoroughly and intensely, consciously appreciate and enjoy what is transpiring with all your heart.  But don’t stop!   When you experience success in correcting lack using these spiritual principles, your job is just beginning.  Don’t let your guard down now. Big mistake!  Take care to thoroughly enjoy your life, your dream, live your dream, every single day.  This allows what has manifested to remain as reality.  Without this kind of diligence, you risk allowing what you have helped create, hand in hand with God, to dissipate and dissolve, only to find yourself back in the same state you were in to begin with, or even worse.

2)  Pay attention: Believe it—you may not even recognize your abundance when it comes to you. Just as I failed to recognize the best hospital in the state when it was offered to me.  Don’t let your ego get in the way.  That was my own mistake.  I just didn’t like the feeling of being pushed.   But the Universe just might feel a little pushy when it is trying to help you.  It’s possible.  Stay open to all possibilities.  Don’t rule anything out without first examining it very closely. It might be your dream.

3)  Follow the bread crumbs.  In receiving, sometimes the universe will give you a small gift.  If you are not careful and do not take note, appreciate the gift, and follow up, you may not find that this small gift is actually a kind of “key” that opens up a much larger realm.

4) Continue to raise your consciousness with meditation and all the other techniques you now know, including taking the time each day to walk, and to breath properly.  Think about it.  In every daily newspaper, there is a vast amount of financial information.  If you know how to discern, if you could really see, you could use this information to be a billionaire within a week or two.  Always remember that when your miracle comes, it may not come hot and steaming delivered to your door on a silver platter as you lie there doing nothing.

Often, a miracle comes as a “seed,” which is, as we have pointed out, a tiny package of potent information.  To receive your information, you have to be conscious and you have to have developed the subconscious faculties of your mind so that they can automatically lead you to synchrony, to be at the right place at the right time.

5) Develop “big pockets,” lots of “empty jars.”  Get ready to receive.  If for example you do not have a bank account or a non-profit foundation, or any number of other preparatory elements in place, the Universe may not have a place to fill. It all goes back to the vacuum principle:  “Nature abhors a vacuum” and will always seek to fill it.  Examine your situation and what you are trying to build and create within your life to help you and others around you.  Make sure that you are a) Acting as if it is already occurring and b) as a corollary make sure everything is in order and in place for you to receive what it is you need to correct your perceived state of lack.

The Twelfth Condition of a Miracle

Recycling.

The last thing that happens in the miracle is that after everyone has been fully fed, there is a large amount of fragments remaining on the ground.  Rather than simply ignore these, the teacher makes a point of having the disciples gather the fragments together, and they fill exactly twelve baskets—a kind of “clue” that we are on the right track in interpreting his instructions as twelve conditions. As the traditional translations put it exactly:  “And they took the excess of the fragments, and they filled twelve handbaskets full.”

There was a man who had a terrible gold swing.  Practice and practice though he might, he couldn’t hit the ball straight and true. One day a famous golf pro came to town and the man availed himself of a lesson.  The first thing the pro told him was that he had no “follow through.”  It was, as he told him, “as though you completely lose concentration and interest as soon as the club hits the ball.”  He shows him how to properly follow through with smooth grace, and immediately he begins to hit the ball with much greater accuracy and efficiency.

The Greek word that is usually translated as excess is a very interesting word:  Perisseuon.  This can simply mean excess, but according to the standard Greek to English dictionary at the end of Strong’s Concordance, it can also mean, “a state of super abundance.”  And this is not a metaphysical dictionary, just a normal dictionary. What a interesting concept:  Superabundance.  In other words, a state in which there is even more than is necessary to correct the lack.

It goes back to efficiency.  Remember when we talked about how it was impossible, on paper, for a bumblebee to fly.  And on paper, a very strong case can be made that life at all, much less successfully evolving life, in a sea of entropy where everything is rigged against order, is impossible.  However, both are possible because of efficiency.

In the human body, when a piece of food is eaten, a series of processes takes place that squeezes every single iota of energy in every one of the chemical bonds of every molecule of every sugar, protein, and fat that is taken in.  This is done by recycling.  That is what the extremely intricate and elaborate series of metabolic cycles are:  They are recycling systems.  One cycle extracts one kind of energy from one kind of chemical bonds.  What is left over is then fed into another cycle which again extracts another kind of energy.  And so on and so forth, so that nothing is wasted.

Recycling therefore makes what is impossible possible.  The miracle worker becomes as aware as humanly possible of every kind of cycle working around her and works with those cycles, recycling and recycling so that she is not party to any waste of any kind.

Activating The Twelfth Condition

1) Gather up the fragments. Don’t ever, ever throw anything away without asking yourself, is there some way, some how, that this “stuff” that I am getting rid of, can be in any way used by someone else, in some way?

For a miracle worker, recycling therefore is no longer a choir or an annoying regulation that must be followed.  Rather, it becomes a sacred ritual, an integral part of the miracle making process that should be honored, celebrated, and cheerfully engaged in to the very fullest extent.

2) this leads to the second way to activate this condition which is not only to recycle but to cultivate the correct mindset, the consciousness behind the recycling.  It’s all about consciousness.  When you engage in the recycling of every sort of resource, you are engaging in an invariably rewarding and absolutely essential component of the miracle process.

3) As Edgar Cayce pointed out in many of his “readings” about material lack, be reluctant to discard your possessions without trying to fix them and squeeze every single bit of use from them you possibly can.  A typical example might be a man whose lawnmower fails to start once or twice. He takes this as a signal, an OK, for him to go out and buy a new, super fancy lawnmower that he thinks will make him happy.

4) A miracle worker, on the other hand, would make absolutely sure that he did everything possible to have the lawnmower checked by an expert, so that he squeezed every bit of use possible out of the machine, using it, fixing it and refixing it for many years if possible.  And only then, rather than throwing it in the dump, making sure it got to a charity or some other place that could get some kind of use either of the machine or at least the metal within it.

5) Close the Loop.  What this means is that you not only recycle everything you can, but you buy recycled materials whenever possible.  If you recycle paper, but always buy brand new paper for your printer, you are failing to engage in one side of the recycling process.  In fact, you do not truly activate this condition until you go to the trouble to actually ask your grocer or hardward store to start carrying recycled forms of this or that, researching and becoming knowledgeable about all the different kinds of recycled products are available.

6)  Recycle your life.  Whenever possible give blood.  Go to the trouble to put yourself on a blood marrow transplant list.  Don’t bury or cremate your body.  What an incredible waste.  Make sure as soon as possible that you sign your documents to make sure you are an organ donar, and that you donate your body to a medical school when you die.  Do you have any idea how valuable your body can be to healers learning anatomy?  Cremation, although it may sound really fashionable and will make you like Ghandi, is actually a gigantic waste.

7)  Make absolutely sure that you have a will.  If you do not, there is no telling what will happen to all your assets when you die.  But one thing is for sure: If you die without a will, “intestate,” none of your assets will ever go to any charity.  Yes, there is little doubt that you will want to leave the majority of what you have to your precious loved ones, but make sure that you have designated that at least 10% is “tithed” to a good, conscientiously and thoughtfully chosen charity.  Even putting this will into place, will automatically set into motion the invisible but unambiguous machinery of the Universe.

The Hidden Parables

First published by Tarcher/Penguin, New York, in 2007

Note:  This  pocketbook edition, leaves out scores of pages of introductory material in the original hardback edition, and gets right to the core of the parables themselves. If you are interested in reading the entire book, Amazon.com has both hard and soft cover copies for very low prices.  I make no money on any sales, but encourage you to read the entire book if what you read below piques your interest.

Parable One:  Forgiveness

The first three parables are what might be called the preparatory steps, necessary to complete before any other work can be done. As was indicated in the introduction, the very first parable in the sequence is arguably the most important, and the most powerful.  It is a kind of spiritual bottleneck that every soul that wishes to improve itself, and learn the other “mysteries,” must pass through. It is about forgiveness.

The parable is ostensibly about two men:  One man owes a lender a small amount, another a great amount. The lender forgives both debtors. The teacher asks, “Which of the two men is more grateful?” The standard interpretation—and we should hasten to add again that all interpretations, from the most fundamentalistic to the most liberal all “work” and should all be sincerely respected and honored–is that someone who has sinned very greatly should be even more motivated to embrace Christianity, and will be even more grateful to be forgiven than someone who has not “sinned” as severely.  It is like saying, “No matter what you have done, and how bad you have been, it is never too late to join.”  And that is an absolutely true and noble concept.

However, on closer examination of the exact wording, a case can be made that the deeper lesson embedded in the parable is not about God forgiving us, it is about us forgiving others, particularly those who have hurt or insulted us the most grievously. This is a critical principle necessary to understand all of the parables:  That they are about you, not other people.  They are about you changing your own erroneous ways of thinking and doing things.  As can never be repeated or recalled enough, are the sayings, “We can only change ourselves,” and “If you want to change the world, begin by changing yourself.”

Insult and injury is often stuffed down into our emotional bodies in what are called “resentments.”  Without care and proper spiritual maintenance, as it were, these resentments can accumulate in a serious way. They are somewhat like tumors or abscesses, and can be just as harmful to your health.  Many of us carry a tremendous and highly debilitating load of resentments.  They cause us many problems, manifesting as depression, anger, self-pity, hopelessness, and a general sense of malaise and low energy.

They can lead to all sorts of pathological ways of coping, including substance abuse, gambling or sex addiction, overeating, criminal behavior, and many other problems. This is in part because it takes a lot of psychic energy, at the subconscious level, to maintain and sublimate these resentments.  The mind has to find ways to survive its own pain—to live with these pockets of anger and fear, and this takes up a great deal of psychic energy that could well be used for more productive things.

The teacher puts forgiveness at the beginning of the series saying in effect, “If you cannot forgive others, if you cannot rid your mind and subconscious of resentment, you cannot work with me.  If your mind, the workshop, the tool you use to think with, to help yourself learn, to create and manifest better circumstances, is filled with anger and hurt, how can it possibly be used to carry out positive intentions, meditation, learning, and prayer?

The practical point: If you are experiencing problems in your life, look first at your inner self. Look deep within.  Yes, maybe another was the main cause of hurt to you, and you contributed very little, if anything to the problem.  This is particularly true with innocent children who have been abused, or people who are victims of seemly random crimes.  But in most cases, as even children are taught: “It takes two.”  Rare, unfortunately, are the souls who can see their own role in the conflicts they become “caught up” in.

Before all other steps in improving your life, actively forgive, thoroughly and genuinely, everyone in your life for which you hold resentment.  This can be a very difficult thing to do sometimes.  It is challenging, humbling, even humiliating sometimes, to call or visit someone with which you have had a long-standing feeling of ill will, and admit your own part in the formation of that problem.

It is especially difficult to forgive the ones that hurt you as a child when you were helpless. But these are often the resentments that have had the most powerful effects on your overall personality and outlook on life. However, when you do forgive, when you accomplish this critical bottleneck in the system of evolution, amazing things can start to happen. As you steadily rid yourself of bad feelings about other people, your mind will become increasingly able to generate positive outcomes, positive changes in your ways of thinking and your life.

Without accomplishing this step, you can never proceed in any effective way towards the goals you hold so dear in your heart.  Work at this as if your life depends upon it.  Make those calls.  Write those letters.  If necessary, get the therapy that will enable you to let go of the pain of your childhood. When your mind, the great instrument with which you create, is clear, at both the conscious and subconscious levels, it becomes a far more powerful tool, a tool that actually works like it is supposed to work.

If you have had problems getting your spiritual techniques and tools to work, first take a hard, ruthless look at your own self. If you hold any ill feelings towards another person, institution, group of people, or figure from your distant past, your mind remains in a poisoned state unable to do what is was designed to do. When it is relieved of the great burden of embedded pockets of pain and anger, it becomes incredibly more effective and efficient.  People have reported some thoroughly amazing and miraculous results after completing this critical spiritual bottleneck.

Parable Two:

The Law of Good

The second parable continues the process of preparing the mind to become an effective tool for enacting the great principles of manifestation and healing of which it is capable.  In this parable, the real lesson, when translated properly, is that there is no satan, no evil, no hell, no organized conspiracy of horrible intentions anywhere in the Universe.  The concept of Evil as a kind of entity or organized force causes some people a great deal of fear—something that religions have capitalized on for centuries.

Fear-False Evidence Appearing Real–adds to the burdens created by resentment, rendering the mind incapable of enacting the powers of good with which it has been imbued by your Father/Mother in heaven.  Work at this.  Look hard.  Remember.  Go deep.  Smoke out every pocket, every single notion of evil, satan or hell–no matter how horrible your life may have been.  There is no organization, no conspiracy, no intelligence or consciousness behind the tough, even agonizing things that happen in our lives.  There simply is no conspiracy, you are not “doomed,” and there are no entities such as devils or demons, ghosts or goblins.   There is only you and God.  This is absolutely imperative to realize at the deepest gut level or you cannot progress to learn the mysteries.  Fear keeps you from being a true, effective child of God, a child that can create great things, heal in powerful and effective ways.

Parable 3

The Law of the Breath

This parable concludes the three preparatory lessons. Conventional translations of this parable say that it is about casting out an “unclean spirit.”  However, the Greek word for spirit used is pneumo, which can be used to mean spirit, but also means breath.  In a way, for the Greeks, spirit and breath were inseparable.  The third parable, when translated with this in mind, indicates that it is about incorrect breathing, and for some, thus makes much more sense.

Breathe.  The cleansing power of the breath is unfathomable and central to all healing.  The breath is the most central and most critical of all physiological processes—a central tenet of emergency medicine, in fact.  In his classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James said, “The foundation of many religious disciplines [especially those in the East] consists in regulation of inspiration and expiration.” It is that important. I have known more great teachers and healers that hold this principle to be central to all healing than I can count.

Breathe. Breathe consciously, deeply, gratefully, and from your solar plexus, your diaphragm and your heart.  Know, and feel, that every inhalation brings in the most important element of all human life, oxygen.  Each exhalation expels the byproduct of metabolism, the acid, carbon dioxide.  By extension each exhalation removes other untoward elements of your being.  There are two primary modes by which your entire physiology are configured:  The sympathetic mode, and the parasympathetic mode.  The sympathic mode—which has nothing to do with the word sympathy–is activated and contributes to, stress: the fight or flight response. In this mode, the blood stream is acidic and the acid that makes this occur is carbon dioxide.

The parasympathetic mode is the relaxation mode of the body, in which the blood stream is not laden with excess carbon dioxide, and is therefore alkaline.  Much has been written in recent times about the advantages of an alkaline state, and an alkaline diet and the like.  However, in reality it is not the diet but the breath that has the most influence on the acidity or alkalinity of the blood stream.  Using deep breathing exercises, you can alkalinize your blood stream within a matter less than five minutes in most cases.  This is one of the most healthy things you can do for yourself, and one of the quickest ways you can relax your mind and spirit, lower your blood pressure, reduce your stress, and gain composure, readying yourself for spiritual calm and knowledge.  This is not optional.  It is required before you can study the rest of the mysteries.

The tools and schools that can teach you more about your breath, are multiform and easily available.  Avail yourself of any instruction you need to learn more, or use what you already know to become a master of the breath. Aerobic exercise, yoga, and meditation all hold central the breath.  No matter what is happening,  make sure to take some amount of time every single day, to breath consciously with purpose and positive intention. Take a class or look the subject up on the Internet.  Learn some good breathing exercises and practice them. There are literally thousands of sites that have perfectly good information about this.

In what is known in the East as pranayam, the breath is regulated in very complex ways, that are not necessarily all that difficult to learn.  The teacher indicates in this parable that breathing away the physiological and higher elements of your being,  is essential to prepare your spirit, so that it can properly assimilate and use the spiritual principles contained in the following sequence of lessons.  It is not optional.  It is required, or you cannot use your mind and spirit to elevate your consciousness, knowledge, and circumstances.  From a purely neurological standpoint, your nervous system, your brain, your mind, cannot work at its highest levels without habitual and healthy breathing.

The most basic breathing exercise I have used for decades was learned in a yoga class, and is widely known.  It consists of inhaling, in a count of four. Take great care to start from a state of complete exhalation, with no breath in the lungs, and end in a state of complete inhalation–in which the lungs are completely full and can hold no more.  The breath is then held for a count of four, and then exhaled with a count of four.  This will quickly alkalinize the body and do wonders for your state of mind, and your health in general. Be sure that you check with your physician to make sure you don’t have any physical condition which might make this undesirable, although very few such conditions exist.

Parable 4:

The Sower

Parable four should be thought of as the “key” parable, for it reveals a great deal about the nature of all the other parables.  Right before the parable is given, the disciples ask the teacher why he is now teaching in this new and unusual way–with stories and metaphors.  His answer is, as we talked about in the introduction,  “because it is for you to know the mysteries.”

The usual translations of this parable talk about a man who goes out into a field and sows seeds.  The seeds sprout and grow, and he gains an entire crop, a huge increase.  Many fundamentalistic people, and again they should be given all the love and respect in the world, believe the parable is talking about sowing–spreading the word of God, or in essence, Christianity into the “field” of the world.  They take it to mean that as “followers” we are required to go out, and in an essentially evangelical way, spread the word of God, to as many people as you can.   Some of your seeds will fall on rocky ground and never even germinate–these represent people who have completely closed minds, even”evil” minds.  Some of your seeds will fall upon fertile ground, upon the minds and hearts of people who will listen and understand and accept the “truths” that you are trying to convey to them.  This is a perfectly acceptable translation, and works superbly for many people.  But another exists, revealed by carefully studying the precise words in the original Greek.

A very strong case can be made by translating the Greek accurately, that what the parable says is that a man sows “the seeds of his self.”  And what are the seeds of one’s self?  I think it no stretch to say that they are one’s intentions, ideas, purposes, and plans.  Nothing in this world is ever created by a person without that thing first being conceived in the mind and solidified as an idea.

This key parable indicates that the primary focus of the parables will be the creative powers of the mind.  That we, as children of God, are expected, just like human children, to help out in the creative process, to help in the betterment of the world, by beginning with the formation of healthy, happy thoughts of goodness, and well-being.  This is a central idea of many new books, and many mystical societies that have existed throughout the centuries.

Many new classics such as Norman Vincent Peale’s, The Power of Positive Thinking, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, James Allen’s, As a Man Thinketh, many of Wayne Dyer’s best-sellers, and quite literally countless other books have elaborated on this cardinal principle:  Our thoughts, and intentions are real factors in the way the universe plays out, they are real “seeds” that we sow in our own realities, and cause our circumstances to be as they are. Essentially:

We are what we think about.

What we focus on expands.

The karma, the Eastern term for cause and effect, is in the intent, and many other sayings reflect this important principle.  It is the standard popular psychology of our world now, and the basis of many therapeutic techniques to help people better their lives. We have to be very careful about what we think.  We can change what we think, and in so doing, change our lives, and correct many forms of “lack.”

The teacher is telling us that this is the central “mystery” of mysteries, a concept that is also central to the study of Quantum Physics.  The so called Heisenberg Principle, that “the observer alters the observed, and that the intent of the experimenter can literally alter the fabric of reality in well-designed and easily repeatable studies,” is standard science in the new millennium. Huge Everett’s Many World Hypothesis, that a new universe is literally created whenever a human being makes a decision, has been accepted as fact by the vast majority of hard-nosed, mathematically accurate physicists.

There are many ways to go about enacting this principle, and countless books that you can read about different techniques that you can use to make your life, and the lives of your loved ones, better.  But of all these I personally like the “blank sheet of paper” approach.  It has been said that the most powerful thing a human being can own is a blank sheet of paper.  For on that piece of paper, can be written the ideas, the seeds, the concepts that will form a person’s reality, if they are nurtured properly and a few simple rules honored.

Almost everyone knows this to be true or at least highly likely so it is nothing new at all.  But surprisingly few of us take the time to actually sit down on a regular basis to write down what it is that we want to manifest within our lives.

After studying this for many years and hashing it over with many other teachers, ministers, and writers, it is my own belief that the most important things to sow, to want, to write down, are not things that one wants to own or have, but rather the feelings that we want to end up experiencing.  For in the final analysis, our entire lives are nothing but a series of feelings—feelings meaning the sum total of our emotional and mental processes, the sensations within our bodies that go with these, and the memories and subconscious processes that invariably critical elements of our lives.

I cannot tell you how many people, including myself, who have manifested, using this simple principle, many “things,” like cars, houses, and other material possessions—but ended up still feeling unhappy.  It is so very important to look beyond these things” to see why you are wanting them.  Invariably you want them because you want certain feelings that you imagine they will bring you.   For example, you might want a house, but the reason you want the house may be more complex.  It is likely you want the house because you want to feel secure, sheltered, surrounded by beauty, and essentially—happy.

After talking this over with so many other experts that I cannot even remember, I don’t recall anyone coming up with anything better than the very simple phrase, “I want to be happy.”  Additional beneficial “feelings” to strive for are being comfortable, having fun and pleasure, generosity, gratitude, feeling love, feeling loved, feeling beautiful, feeling innocent and clear in conscience, and feeling healthy.  As the teacher says, “Seek ye first the spirit (feelings or essence), and then these things will be added unto you.”  Let God do the work for you, for you do not really know what will make you truly happy.  You may wish for a soul mate, list all of his or her qualities, and get exactly what you write down.  But you might have forgotten, as has been the case with some of my clients, to write down “single,” or “sober.”  Write down how you want to feel and trust God to find what will truly make you happy.

So, right now, for there is no other time, and no matter how many times you have done so before, get a blank sheet of paper and sow some good seeds.  Write your “affirmations,” as they are referred to in the present tense.   That is, do not say, I want to feel happy, or I want to feel secure.  Instead write down “I feel happy, I feel comfortable, I feel healthy, I feel generous, I feel grateful, I feel love for others and for God, I feel great!”

Thinking a good thought is one good way to sow a good seed, but when you write that thought down, you are taking the thought to the next level of manifestation, the next level of solidity.  For you may think one thing today, but think and feel something entirely different tomorrow.  But what you have written down in words will remain just as it is, and will help steady you and keep you locked on course, and faithful to your real goals. In this process remember two important caveats that will be elaborated upon later:  First, always try to include the wellbeing of others in your intents to avoid becoming self-centered.  Second, always put them in the present tense.  Obviously, as many of us know, saying, “I want a new house,” will leave you in a state of wanting a house.  Instead say, “I have a new house.”

Parable 5:

The Parable of the Tares

The Problem with Subconscious Thoughts

This parable directly follows the Parable of the Sower for a very logical reason.  It addresses a problem with the “sowing of thought forms” that many teachers fail to realize.  In the parable, a man goes out into his field and sows his crop.  Then, at night, his “enemy” comes and also sows, along with the good seeds, tare or weed seeds.  When the crop comes up, so do the weeds, and the sower wonders how this could have happened.  He asks what he should do, and is told not to try to go into his field and pull up the weeds by their roots, or he will at the same time disrupt and kill the roots of the good plants.  Instead he is told to wait until the crop has matured and then cull out the undesired elements and “give them to the angels” who will burn them.

What He is talking about is the subconscious mind.  The subconscious mind is a vast accumulation of every memory, every feeling, every thought, every experience that you have ever had.  It is analogous to the hard drive on your computer—it contains the memory of everything that has been inputted.  The screen of your computer is analogous to your conscious mind.  On it, only one “page” of information is displayed at one time.  The conscious mind can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

The problem is that although you may sow many good seeds with good intent and good faith, your subconscious mind will also be sowing unconscious thoughts, and these might be entirely contrary to what you really want for your life.   But what is to be done?  Are we to attempt to delve into the subconsciousness, with therapy perhaps, to “weed out” all the negative and unhappy, unhealthy thoughts that are buried deep within us?

Note: The Parable talks about what is normally translated as “the enemy,” which comes at night while the sower is asleep, and sows the undesirable thoughts.  Metaphorically the enemy is the ego, and by extension the part of it which is the subconscious mind.  The teacher did not choose his words lightly.  What happens at night when we sleep?  We dream. This is the process of the subconscious mind expressing and attempting to cope with and heal, its issues.  Ergo, there is little doubt that the “enemy” is a metaphor for the subconscious mind sowing seeds in a somewhat random, uncontrolled manner, while we sleep.

We know that the enemy cannot be the “devil,” which is the normal interpretation of the wording. We know this because in Parable Two the teacher shows us logically that there can be no devil, no organized conspiracy of evil because “a kingdom divided unto itself, cannot stand.”  If there were a conspiracy of evil, its constituents would by their own nature, turn upon one another and destroy, disorganize the process.

In the first parable, we were taught to rid ourselves of all our resentments via forgiveness, paying special attention to the most grievous and intense resentments we hold within.  Should we not continue that process by going further and attempt to rid ourselves of all the subconscious negative thought forms that exist below the surface, for they will be sowing seeds along with our conscious minds, and likely cause all kinds of problems.

The answer, according to the parable is that we are not to attempt this.  That it is not only impossible but may very well cause harm to ourselves.  In digging up all the negative “junk” deep within, we will be wasting a huge amount of time and psychic energy. Moreover, the disclosure and memory of all our hurts, and failures, and heartaches, will disturb the conscious mind to the point that it will not be able to concentrate fully and with a positive mindset on the “good seeds” it is working with.

Instead we are to let the process go, put it into the hands of our “angels” which is just another way of saying that we are to put the entire process including our negative subconscious thought forms, into the hands of God.  God can handle it.  You cannot. Let go and let God, and all will be well. To activate this parable, try this mental exercise.  Imagine that your mind is a computer, and can be programmed.  Imagine that it has a “trash can” in one “corner.” Now, every time you catch yourself thinking any sort of negative thought—and this is far easier said than done—“dump” this thought into the trash can.  Using your power of faith, imagine that this trash can is handled by God.  This actually works. When you have turned over any negative thought form to God, you have automatically neutralized it, and it cannot bear fruit.

Parable 6:

The Mustard Seed,

The Law of Expansion.

The parable is short:  The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field.  Which indeed is the least of all seeds: But when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof. As C. J. Jung once wrote:  “The great principle or beginning, heaven is infused into man the microcosm, who reflects the star-like natures and thus, as the smallest part and end of the work of Creation.”

The usual interpretation of this parable, which is quite valid in its own right, is that the seed is Jesus and his words.  The tree is the church, the religion that grows from his words, and indeed becomes a great force in this world.  However, looking deeper we find more. The conscious Universe, God, is likened to a seed, a thinker whose thoughts create the entire array of universes.  Consider: a seed is a package of an enormous, almost unfathomable amount of genetic information, which when activated, can cause the organization of random elements which surround it to form cells, tissues, roots, stems, leaves, branches, and finally fruit.

A seed is a form of intelligence.  Even the most profoundly complex mechanisms of modern science are extremely crude by comparison to the accuracy and precision with which a simple seed can organize trillions of molecules.  A human seed, an embryo can form an entire human being, with approximately 100 trillion cells which can cooperate immaculately with one another to form a being that can think, work, create, and even contemplate its Creator and its own consciousness.  A feat so spectacular, that when we compare our abilities as a country of people, a mere 300 million in the US, to cooperate in our relatively awkward fashion, we cannot even come close to realizing the enormity, the miracle that we are.

Your body contains about 50 trillion cells, ten billion neurons, and trillions of synapses. Just to keep you thinking, there are about 100 times as many atoms in a single human cell as there are stars in the Milky Way, our galaxy.  And they are all organized with immaculate, unfathomable precision.  Our DNA molecules alone is so complex and powerful that few scientists can comprehend the enormous amount of intelligence that it took to create it, even when given  4 ½  billion years to do so.

Surely there can be no doubt at this point in our study the teacher was a strong believer in the venerable axiom “As above, so below.”  This parable is such a direct and unambiguous expression of this principle that there seems little, if any equivocation remaining to confuse the issue:  The Kingdom, The Universe, God which is “above” operates like a tree, or any other living and growing organism.

Furthermore, although it has an odd sound to at first, is it so impossible to imagine that the Son of God, could not know of the fact that scientists have now established:  That there are an infinite number of universes, and they are splitting and splitting and splitting constantly and forever into ever more universes.

When physicists diagram what this looks like, their diagrams actually look exactly like trees, with a trunk, large branches splitting into smaller branches, and smaller branches splitting into twigs. This is not a mere intellectual curiosity, but in fact of profound practical importance to all learning miracle workers.  For the laws and principles which operate in one universe may differ in a new universe, according to science.  Ergo, what may seem impossible in one universe, may very well be possible in another universe.

We know from science now, that every time a conscious being makes a decision, a new universe buds off, is born, from the parent universe.  In a real sense, real miracle workers, who can actually manifest highly unlikely and unexpected beneficial changes and circumstances, are basically excellent “deciders.”  They decide—with resolution, conviction, and complete faith– they intend that things will heal, lack will vanish, war will become peace, and many other good things.

The Parable of the Mustard Seed is an excellent example of the power of the teacher’s amazing intellect, his genius.  He was trying to teach us, without the use of complex words like “parallel universes” and so forth, in a story form, about the nature of the universe.  And, in subsequent parables, exactly how to use this information. But, easy does it.  Take each parable one by one and think upon it until you reach a suitable depth of understanding and wonderment.

Parable 7:

The Seed Growing Secretly

The Subconscious Mind

And he said, So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground.  And he should sleep, and rise day and night, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.

This is a most interesting and important parable for all of us learning miracle workers.  It is actually about the subconscious mind.  Countless books over the last 100 years or so, and especially in the last 20 years have been written specifically about the power of the subconscious mind.  You can easily find scores of them on the Internet bookstores if you hunt around a little bit.

What these books say is amazingly consistent from one book to the next with very few substantial differences. So, the quality of the information within them would seem to be very reliable, triangulated amongst a wide variety of experts from many walks of life.

We know from the previous parables that the seeds” the teacher is talking about are the “seeds of the self.”  That means that the seeds are our ideas, plans, intentions, and goals.  When we plant them the act very much like ordinary garden seeds.  At first, nothing happens.  Because they are underground, we cannot see them, and may grow silently while we are impatiently thinking that nothing will come of our efforts.

However, just as a seed germinates and its fantastically intricate genetic information organizes the randomly distributed molecules of soil around it, the water that the rains bring, and the carbon dioxide in the air and forms beautifully constructed cells and tissues to form a fully functional plant, our minds, or to speak more correctly, the mind of God is the most productive field of all.  Seeds, thought forms, sown into its most fertile field, will grow and will manifest, if they are nurtured and cultivated properly—with faith, persistence, and trust in the process.

The point of the parable is that this process is a mystery.  The way, the mechanism, by which this occurs, is unknown. The lesson is that this does not matter.  The process will work, regardless of whether we know how it works or not.  Therefore, the teacher is saying, “Don’t worry. Don’t let any of this stop you! This may not make any logical or scientific sense to you, but that should not discourage you in the slightest.  You don’t need to understand it.  All you have to do is have faith in it and take the initiative to use it.”

The fertile soil which can germinate your thought forms is your subconscious mind, which as we said, is likened unto the hard drive on your computer.  It contains an unfathomable amount of information and can do things that we do not understand.

But the subconscious mind—and this is very important—is also connected to what Jung termed the “collective unconscious.”  The collective unconscious, to continue the computer analogy, is the equivalent of the Internet.  By connecting to it, your own subconscious mind has access to and can influence the collective unconscious, and thus give it access to an incredible amount of information.  And in the final analysis, much of any miracle is information. “Where should we go to find our soul mate? What investments should we put our resources into?  What company has the right job for me?  Where can I find the right house, or car?–or any other good thing that we might need to better our lives.

The great news is that we don’t have to be conscious of any of this, we don’t have to understand how any of this works.  Like the seed growing secretly, the process is automatic and guided by the “genetic information” available in the collective unconscious.  So, go ahead.  Get started. Start using the automatic assistance of Divine Intelligence to automatically help you manifest better circumstances, better healing for you and  your loved ones.

Parable 8:

The Leaven

The Law of Expansion

The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took,

and hid in three measure of meal, till the whole was leavened.

Leven is yeast, and yeast forms cells, which expand by forming gas.  This is what causes bread to rise and have a “bubbly” appearance. This is amazing.  For it took scientists many centuries to figure out that our own Universe is expanding, a now well-accepted fact discovered by Hubble.  But what is even more amazing is that this expansion is not slowing down like we might expect it to, but rather speeding up.  This does not make any sense whatsoever and is a complete mystery of modern science.

Did the teacher know this?  I don’t see why not. And he is offering an answer as to why the expansion is occurring and probably why this expansion is speeding up:  There is some force or quality or quantum phenomena built into the fabric of the Universe that causes it to automatically expand.  In fact, when astronomers carefully map out the distribution of galaxies in our Universe, and one astronomer,   , spent much of her life doing just that, she found something totally unexpected and truly mysterious.

If there was a Big Bang which blew all the matter and energy within a infinitely small “singularity” into what is now the expanding Universe, we would expect to find that the galaxies are distributed quite randomly through space.  Instead, the three-dimensional map that she made from her lengthy studies looks almost exactly like—bread.  It is full of  “bubbles” and “strands” holding this bubbles together.  This is one of the great mysteries of modern astronomy.  What in Heaven, what force would provide organization to these “randomly” blown apart universes?

But there is another level to this parable, for as above, so below.  Expansion occurs within our day to day lives as well.  As the last parable indicated, we cannot know the mechanisms by which many of these things take place, but the fact is that when you concentrate on something, it will tend to expand in your life.  Life can be viewed as a glass of water, either half full, or half empty. When you concentrate on what you do not have, or what is lacking in your health, or other aspects of your life, this lack will tend to automatically expand.  Something, we do not know what it is, has been instilled into the universe to make this expansion happen.  If we concentrate on life as a glass half full, on what we already have, what we have will expand.  It is our choice.

Thousands of books have been written about the power of positive thinking, and if you want to help convince your mind that this principle is true, so that you are increasingly looking at life as a glass half full, by all means, pick up some copies of these books and CDs, and spend your time concentrating on them, instead of the relatively strange adventure shows and dramas available on your TV and computer screens.  Saturate yourself with positive energy, positive consciousness in every way that you can manage.

And remember, you won’t be able to know how this process of expansion works:  The parable indicates the Creator “hid” the expansive force within his Creation.  Nonetheless, as his son, his daughter, it is your responsibility to help him out, just like any other good child would be expected to help his parents out around the house as he matures.  God is counting on you to help him create good things, true things, healing things, helping things, and better things in general.  And as his son or daughter, you have been “genetically imbued” with some of His creative powers. What you focus on expands.

Parable 9:

The Hidden Treasure

The Philosopher’s Stone

Again, the Kingdom of Heaven, is like unto a treasure hid in a field.

And when a man found it, out of joy,  he sold everything he had, and bought the field.

First of all, in is interesting that the man didn’t just take the treasure. Instead, he did it the ethical way.  He sold everything that he had to raise the money, and bought the field, so that the treasure was his legally clear and free. Secondly, the parable is interesting because it again talks about something being “hidden.”  That is why the book was named, “The Hidden Parables.”

For some, and this is perfectly reasonable and valid, the hidden treasure represents the love of God, personal salvation, or a personal relationship with Christ—or the “Holy Ghost” who the teacher said he left behind for us to commune with and learn from.  This works very well for some people, and illustrates once again how the parables still work even when viewed from different angles, or interpreted on different levels.  It is evidence of the genius of the teacher—that he could somehow foresee and create his legacy of lessons so that they would work for everyone at every level.

For people, of a more mystical or metaphorical mindset, the hidden treasure, is the knowledge of cause and effect—that thoughts are things and can create and change circumstances, universes.  Thoughts can heal.  Thoughts can correct lack of any kind.  Thoughts can find you spiritual peace of mind.  They are like a magic bottle with a genie inside!  You can even use them to ask for greater things, use them to do “Even greater works than these,” as the teacher himself put it.

To summarize: the parable has two levels of meaning which are of practical value for a would be miracle worker.  First of all, whenever you are faced with a decision, whenever you come to a fork in the road, remember how powerful your decisions are.  According to quantum physics, every time you make a decision, a new “baby” universe, splits off,  is “born,” from the “parent” universe.  The man who found the treasure was presented with such a fork in his road:  He could have simply stolen the hidden treasure and no one would have been the wiser.  Instead, he made the ethical decision,  took the correct fork in the road, and sold everything that he had to buy the land properly.

Never but never, do anything unethical, even if no one will ever possibly find out that you are doing so.  For you will create a world for yourself which is flawed at the outset and may lead to untoward consequences and conditions that you cannot foresee.

Secondly, you don’t necessarily have to go the extreme to “sell everything you own,” but it is highly recommended that you sell, or give away as much material stuff that is cluttering up your life, as possible.  To move ahead efficiently on the spiritual path, many people have discovered on their own, usually as they become older, that they don’t need most of the “things” they have surrounded themselves with. Streamlining, simplifying your life, is of tremendous value when you want to give yourself more time and energy to live, to meditate, pray and study, and to enjoy life.  It is a bit foolish to learn and put into practice all these great concepts, if you cannot enjoy your life.

Next, as the man in the story did, keep most of your new spiritual discoveries about the powers of positive thinking to yourself.  Talking about this kind of thinking usually will make people think you are either crazy, or have “gone off on the wrong path.” There is no reason for you to talk about these things at this stage.  Don’t proselytize or give unsolicited advice.  Keep your opinions to yourself, unless someone with an open mind, or who is in need asks you to share them.  In due course, when you are stronger, have more experience, are more articulate, and are safely surrounded by others who understand these principles, then you can speak more openly. For now, keep these matters to yourself.

Finally, meditate and think upon the fact that if it is indeed true that you can use your own mind, in cooperation with the Creator, to help miraculous things to happen, to heal your life and make it better, then doing everything you can to secure this treasure is appropriate.  Reset your mindset and your priorities.  Make it a point to learn more about these things and begin putting them to practical use within your life.  This should be one of the very top, if not the very highest, of all the priorities in your life.

As the teacher said, and this can hardly be repeated enough, “Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and then all these things will be added unto you.”  Don’t do things backwards.  Don’t put the cart before the horse, as they say.  Put your spiritual growth and knowledge as your first priority and the “things” will automatically come into your life when you need them.  Have faith!  For this is as true as true can be.

Parable 10:

The Pearl of Great Price

In progress

Parable 11:

The Dragnet

The Law of Decision and

The Law of Discrimination

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a dragnet cast into the sea, and when it was filled it drawn up onto the beach, and they gathered the good fish, but the bad they threw away.

The ocean, a deep and invisible body of water, is filled with all sorts of creatures.  Again, it is a metaphor for our subconscious minds, which are again, a metaphor for what functions as a “hard-drive” for our minds, our “computers.” Like the ocean, it contains all manner of “creatures,” thought forms that can range from divine, healthy, and happy, to bizarre, painful, and deeply disturbed.

Consider a garden.  Anyone who has had a garden knows that he or she plants only good seeds each year, yet somehow, there are always weeds spring up.  No matter what the gardener does to eliminate the weeds, and their seeds, the weeds keep coming up for years and years.  That is because the soil of a garden contains many, many seeds, some of which are dormant, and hidden to far below the surface to germinate.  But, when the newyear comes and the garden is tilled, some of these old seeds will be brought to the surface, find the necessary conditions for germination, and inexorably manifest as weeds.

In the Parable of the Tares, we are taught to wait until the consequences of our negative thought forms, coming from the unconscious mind, manifest.  Only then can we cull them out, without disturbing the beneficial processes of our intentionally sown healthy seeds.  The Parable of the Dragnet takes this to another level, giving us additional information on how to deal with the subconscious mind that can be loaded with all sorts of undesirable things.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a drag net,” means that there exists a process, a characteristic, a kind of personality trait of God, the Universe.  It is a device which automatically brings to the surface, well-lighted, into our conscious minds, the most harmful and potentially dangerous thought forms deep within. It is a power or process of discrimination that we can harness if we put our subconscious minds into the hands of God.  God will bring what needs to be seen to the surface, at just the right time, so that we can become aware of what is within and deal with it intelligently.

Our “weeds seeds,” below the surface of our conscious minds can be brought to light, at which point we can let go of them and put them into the most capable hands of God who can deal with them.  With time and patience, these negative thought forms will steadily diminish and the mind will become cleaner and cleaner, and thus less likely to germinate untoward circumstances.

To harness this “characteristic” of God, we need to regularly meditate.  Meditation is the process of watching ourselves think in a dispassionate, unattached way.  Human beings brains have a special area called the “prefrontal lobe.” The prefrontal lobe can be thought of as a separate brain, “above” or “ahead” of the rest of our brain—much like a “front porch of the mind.”  Current neuroscience and comparative anatomy holds that only human beings possess a significant prefrontal lobe, yet it can be argued that in time, they will find analogous regions in the brains of higher primates, cetaceans, dogs, and other highly intelligent animals.

Regardless, meditation is a way of essentially going out onto that front porch of the mind, turning around, and watching the mind think. When properly performing, the meditator simply watches what is happening in the mind, in a completely unattached way, just letting them go, not trying to block or alter them.  Letting them go into the hands of God.

And so, this is the ultimate meaning of the Parable of the Dragnet.  It is a metaphor for the process of classic meditation, which gradually, steadily, allows the mind to clear itself of conflicts, cognitive dissonance, fear, anger, resentment, anxiety, and other negative processes that we do not want to have sitting around in our minds, ready to germinate and manifest unhappy circumstances.

To activate the parable, try one of the oldest and simplest forms of meditation from the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Meditate on God’s name, which scholars agree is the word Yeh Wey.  (pronounced “yeah, way”)  Seat yourself comfortably and quietly, and sound the word “yeah” silently during each inhalation, and “way” during the exhalation.  At the beginning level, no attempt need be made to regulate your breathing.  Just let go and let the breaths “fall” naturally into your body, and “fall” naturally out.  As you do this, many distracting thoughts will invariably pop up into your mind.  The trick is to simply watch them, as if to say, “Oh, I see that thought, it is noted, and I let it go.  Another thought will then replace it and the process will go on and on. A meditator should never be discouraged if the mind is chaotic and difficult to still.  Even just the attempt to quiet and clean it in this manner will produce fine results.

Over time, you can add to this simple technique, the breathing exercise described in parable three—dividing each inhalation into four deep breaths, holding it for a count of four, and exhaling fully on a count of four. Simultaneously, silently sound the “yeah” and the “way.”  If you research this yourself, you will find that it is indeed true that this is the oldest name for God in our faith, and for many centuries early on, was kept secret, and written without the vowels.  This was done to keep the name secret, and one can only speculate why that was thought necessary.  But the technique, however simple, is extremely effective.  Meditation has been shown to increase mental acuity and intelligence, calm both the mind and the body, and over time build wisdom, depth, and character.  With time and persistent daily practice you will be able to allow your conscious mind, within the prefrontal lobe, to “fall” deeper and deeper into the subconscious and be able to “watch yourself dreaming,” a very pleasant and healthy experience.

Parable 12

The Unmerciful Servant

Perpetual Forgiveness

In this parable, the teach tells us to forgive anyone who troubles us, not once or twice, but seventy times seven times.  In other words, perpetually.  In the first parable, the teacher clearly establishes that forgiveness is the key, the spiritual bottleneck that all souls must pass through before they can advance.  But he stresses that this is so important that he “refreshes” each follower’s mind at this point in the sequence with another parable about forgiveness, this time going yet deeper into the process.

In the parable, a servant owes a lender 10,000 talents, and has no way that he will ever be able to pay this debt off.  He humbles himself before the lender, and behold, the lender forgives him the entire debt. That is great, but later on, another man who owes the forgiven servant a small amount of money humbles himself in the same way and asks to be forgiven. But he is not.  Instead the forgiven servant, sends the man to debtors prison until he can pay his debt. The original lender, the one that was owed 10,000 talents, finds out about this.  He is so upset that he binds the ungrateful servant over to the authorities who brutalize him until he can pay the entire amount.

Now, the very first thing to keep in mind is that the fundamentalistic approach to this parable should be fairly easy to guess, and the words taken to mean that if you are forgiven by God, and yet fail to forgive your own debtors, God will do all sorts of unpleasant things to you until you pay your debt.

It is the author’s opinion that the teacher could not possibly have said any such thing about God.  God is a being of infinite compassion and never, but never does anything painful to anyone.  We cause our own pain.  We are responsible for our own circumstances at all times, and should never forget this.  The parable was written perhaps one or two hundred years after the teacher died, and it seems almost certain that someone along the line embellished the parable with the part about the servant being “bound over to be tortured” until he paid his debt.”  Forget about that part.  It simply cannot be so.

But do, by all means, take a new and even harder look at the resentments, judgments, anger, fear, and ill will you hold towards the people who have harmed you.  These negative thought forms are literally killing you, slowly but surely.  In the last parable we learned about meditation.  Meditation provides the perfect platform from which to launch your new program of deeper forgiveness.

As you meditate and memories of insults, injuries, and other maladaptive behaviors that you have been subject to float up into your consciousness, say to them, “Go in peace.”  And as the previous parable says, if necessary do it seventy times seven times, 490 times—in essence for as many times as it takes until you are peace within.

This process, again, will continue to prepare your mind to be an ever effective and powerful tool to cooperate with the Creator in establishing better circumstances for you and those around you.  Believe it:  People will steadily notice a change in your demeanor.  You will become calmer, more cheerful, more easy-going, more friendly, more compassionate, and in general, happier.  The process of forgiveness, combined with meditation is so potent, that it will heal all sorts of deep wounds which, although you are not conscious of it, continue to generate negative repercussions within your life and your current relationships, even on your finances, career, and intellectual abilities/concentration.

Parable 13

The Good Samaritan

The Law of Reflex Compassion, I

This is perhaps the most well-known of the parables.  In it, a man is beset with robbers, who take all his clothes, beat him, take everything else he has, and leave him for “half dead,” along the side of the road.  Before long a priest walks by and sees him, but apparently in disgust, just keeps walking.  Another man sees him but goes to the other side of the road and also passes him by.  Finally a Samaritan traveling the road sees him, is “filled with pity,” and acts completely differently.  He bandages the man’s rather severe wounds, puts him on his horse or donkey, and takes him to an inn. The next day, he goes to the innkeeper, pays his bill, and tells him to continue taking care of the injured man until he is well, promising to take care of entire bill.

One problem with the standard translation is the word “pity,” which connotes a kind of condescension and a codependent way of thinking. The Greek word used is splagehnizomai which, when fully translated means, “moved with compassion.”  Not felt compassion, but was moved by it—set into action to do something to help.

What a fine man.  And what a fine example he sets for us.  For we are being told, in no uncertain terms that it is exactly this kind of action that will be expected up us as followers, required of us. Maybe you are already like this man.  I have no doubt that many people who are a point in their lives where they find a book like this interesting enough to read, are the kind of people the Good Samaritan was. This parable is really quite direct and simple and does not require a great number of words to interpret.  The point is that almost all of us that are interested in spiritual matters like the parables are already at a point in their personal evolution that they act like this good man all the time.

A case can be made that the best interpretation of this parable is that it is required of us as followers of the teacher to develop what might be called a “reflex of compassion.”  A reflex is something that is automatic.  When the doctor hits your knee with a hammer, nerve impulses travel up to the spine, interact with synapses there, and a signal is immediately sent down to the muscles of the leg to move.  The brain is not involved, and no amount of thinking can influence the movement of the muscles once the tendons above the kneecap have been struck.

We need to be so good at compassion that we act the same way as the Good Samaritan, or even better, automatically, without even thinking about it, at all times.  We need to react when we are confronted with information that anyone, anywhere, is in true need.  This means that if, for example, we see something on the news about a tragedy or disaster, famine, plague, or other calamity which is causing people to suffer, we need to actually do something.

For me, it works like this, at least when I am acting on my best behavior which is hardly 100% of the time.  I know many people who far more generous and consistent than I am.  But if I see on the news that there is a famine in Africa and hundreds of thousands of children are dying, I cannot, in good conscience just continue sitting there.  I need to actually do something.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to necessarily always mean that you go as far as the Samaritan went to help the man he found in need.  Even a small act of kindness is far, far better than none at all.  When I become aware of such a famine and I am disturbed by it, I already have a list of charities on hand, and either their Internet addresses or their phone numbers.  I have already researched such charities. There are plenty of very good organizations that rate charities on their efficiency and the ways that they work.

CharityWatch.org, and CharityNavigator.org are simple places to start. With them you can find out which charities deliver the most of your dollars to the people who actually need them, which charities try to proselytize or change other people’s religions in return for their help, and which ones are really good at helping people help themselves.

It does not take but a minute or two to pick up the phone or log onto the internet, and go to one of the best charities and make a donation.  And it does not have to be a big donation either.  Even $5 is far better than nothing, better for your own soul, and if done consistently will allow you to have better self-esteem, and a better feeling about yourself in general.  It will help make you happy.  The old saying that you have to “give until it hurts,” is ridiculous.  Giving should not hurt. Give until you feel great!

Just make sure that as a follower of this particular teacher, you are not a hypocrite.  You don’t just read books, talk about the principles, and go to church to be seen.  You need to act exactly like the Samaritan whenever you can. It is not optional.  As we will see, this principle is so important that it will be elaborated upon in the very next parable, and is also one of the Twelve Conditions of a Miracle.

Parable 14:

The Friend at Midnight.

The Law of Reflex Compassion, II

As promised this parable continues and expands upon the parable of the Good Samaritan.  In it, there is a man who has some nice visitors appear somewhat unexpectedly, at his door, at midnight. Perhaps they were having an emergency situation.  We are not told.

The man is a good man and sees that the family, and particularly the children, are hungry—they ask him for three loaves of bread.  The problem is that he doesn’t have any on hand. So, rather than do nothing, he actually goes to the house next door and knocks on it.  The owner shouts from within, “Don’t bother me now, please. Our family is already asleep, the children are in bed with us, and the whole house has been shut down and locked up for the night.”  But the friend persists.

Most interestingly of all, the parable concludes with the teacher saying, “Ask and will be given to you. Search and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Normally, this critical saying is quoted on its own, out of context.  But when we learn the whole story, the quote makes more sense.  Yes, we can ask, and it will be given to us, but only if

To understand how this process really works, study the parable in depth. First of all, you have to realize, if you are imaging the same thing happening to you, just how much political capital you are using up when you wake up your neighbor and beg him to give you some food.  And you have to put yourself in the other man’s shoes as well:  How would you feel if your neighbor came to your door in the middle of the night, woke everyone up by pounding on the door, and shouted through it that you needed some food?  As it turns out in the parable, the neighbor finally does answer the door because the man is so persistent.  And he gives him some bread to feed the hungry family.

It is a two-fold lesson.  First of all, we are taught to be like the man in the first house.  Even though one of your friends—obviously in this day and age this would not work for strangers unfortunately—wakes you up in the middle of the night, perhaps with a phone call, perhaps in person, and asks for your help. If you are to receive when you ask, you are first required as one of the teacher’s students to get up and actually do something about the matter.  Even if that means it will bruise your ego and use up whatever political have honored his words and his teachings, by acting like the men in the parable.

People may ask you all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts, times, and places, but the principle remains the same.  When someone asks of you, do whatever you have to do to give.  God will treat you pretty much exactly how you treat others. The point is that if you are actually going to call yourself a follower, you are required to help anyone who needs your help, even if it is embarrassing, disgusting—like bandaging a naked stranger’s wounds, or highly inconvenient in any other way.

Say for example you are in your car waiting in line for a red light to turn green and you are towards the head of the line.  Up ahead you see a poor person with their seemingly ubiquitous dog and tattered clothing and shopping cart, with a sign that says God Bless You, or I will work for food.  Think for example, that you are pretty well convinced that this is an authentic poor person who is in real need and that you want to hand them a one or five dollar bill.

The problem is that if you stop your car to do this, everyone behind you is going to start blowing their horns at you, like they always do.  It is going to hurt your pride, your ego.  But that is not a sufficient excuse to avoid giving when asked.  In such an instance, as a follower you are now required to stop anyway, endure the humiliation, and help the person in need.  It will be left to you to imagine or recall analogous situations.

Act, be moved with compassion.

Don’t think about it.

Just do it.

Go the extra mile, whenever possible.

Yes, you can ask and it will be given unto you, but only if you have consistently treated others in the same way.  Who is to say that God might be busy with other things, wars, famines, and plagues, and that it might be a bit inconvenient for Him to stop everything and concentrate on helping you.  But He will stop what He is doing and help you if you have honored him and his words by acting like the Samaritan

Parable 15:

The Rich Fool

The Law of Confidence

and

The Law of Circulation

Parable 16 is one of the longest and most complex of the parables and embodies two important laws or principles: Confidence—or faith–and Circulation. To paraphrase, it goes like this:  A rich man had lands that produced so much that he didn’t have space to store everything. So, he tears down his barns and builds larger ones.  He feel quite good at that point and he says to his soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, and be merry.” The teacher says that the man is a fool.  He does not need to worry about his life, or what he will eat, or about his body, or what he will wear.

Then he tells them some of the beautiful metaphors with which we are so familiar, including:  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. So, if God clothes the grasses of the field…how much more will he clothe you?

There are differing ways to articulate the law of confidence and the subclauses that complete it.  We might be tempted to say the parable illustrates the Law of Greed, but it is actually a positive lesson, on confidence, and faith. The farmer produces a state of  “superabundance” in which he has more than he can actually store or even use.  He represents you, the student of the mysteries, perhaps not now, but in due course if you follow the parable sequence faithfully.  If you do you too will experience a state of super-abundance.  What does this man do with his excess supply, his over abundance?  Instead of sharing it, or giving it away and so allowing it to circulate, he goes to great lengths to hoard it, believing that it will protect him in every way.   He lets his guard down and celebrates in a lazy way, resting on his laurels.

But God says to the man, “You fool!  This very night your life is being demanded of you.   And the things you have prepared, whose will they then be?

The Law of Circulation is also illustrated by this parable.  Recall, that in the first chapter of the original book, the first condition of the Twelve Conditions of a Miracle is emptiness and is illustrated by a story.  In a nutshell, a farmer, in experiencing a drought, hoards all the water in the stream winding through his lands by building a dam and collecting it in a pool.  This gives him a false sense of security. For the flow, being as it is, will find a way to flow no matter what you do to try to block it. For the farmer, the stream established new channels that flowed around his pool and his lands, thus making his state of lack even worse. The farmer in our current parable makes the same, exact mistake. He hoards his excess in huge barns and gains a false sense of security from his material wealth.

I once had a spiritual advisor whose favorite way to solve the problems of his advisees by asking them the same question.  Who do you want to rely on?  God, with his infinite resources, or man, yourself, with very limited resources.

When you have evolved to the point when you have complete confidence in God’s willingness, His care, his sense of responsibility in protecting you and supplying you, your confidence, your faith will allow energy and resources to flow into your life unimpeded.

Parable 16:

The Barren Fig Tree

The Law of Delay

In this parable another farmer—the agrarian metaphors abound in this series—has a fig tree, he has planted over three years ago. Each year he comes to see if there is any fruit on the tree, and each year he is disappointed.  He says to his gardener, “Cut it down, why should I be wasting my soil in this way?  The Gardener replies by telling him to be more patient.  He asks for permission to give the tree another year.  He says that he will loosen the ground around the tree and fertilize it.  If it then fails, after another year, to bear fruit, then he can cut it down.

When I was a young doctor, many years ago, my first practice was in rural Kentucky to allow me to help pay back my student loans.  One of my patients was a man who owned an orchard, which was very abundant and fruitful. I told him one day that I had bought a small plot of land, and wanted to plant some fruit trees on it.  I told him that I would fertilize them plentifully and in that way insure that they would quickly bear fruit. His reply surprised me. “No, no, no!” he said. “Never fertilize a young fruit tree. Let it struggle and be patient. If you do, it will be a good producer and will bear fruit more abundantly and of better quality. The slower a fruit tree grows, when it is a sapling, the more fruit it will bear when it is mature.”

I remembered this little known fact about fruit trees for a long time and thought upon it. I also noticed that the same principle applied to human beings as well.  In fact many scientific studies have long since established the fact that the earlier a person matures, the lower will be his station in life.  Conversely, slow maturers, who may not “blossom” until relatively late in their life times, often reach the highest pinnacles.

I am not a particularly patient man, so I have little authority by which to lecture anyone else on the subject.  But I do know this, in the process of manifestation, we should be very thankful for the Law of Delay that has been built into the process.  For if we were to have all our desires and prayers answered quickly as children, we would obviously destroy ourselves and cause all sorts of trouble.

It has been my observation that the more highly evolved a person is, the more quickly he or she can manifest things.  And what is evolution?  Is it not knowing a great deal of complex and fancy metaphysical processes?  Not at all. Evolution is calibrated by the natural tendency of a soul to think of the well being of others first.  It is therefore characterized by kindness and compassion.  Some of the most evolved people I have met in my travels were very simple people, some of whom had only attained an eighth grade education.  But as I sometimes sat at their bedsides as they faced death or extreme pain and anguish, I noticed that they had an inner calm, and inner strength that was far greater than mine and exceeded that of many highly educated professors and writers.  I also noticed that such people invariably possessed a natural, calm patience, born of their long-standing faith.

This only makes perfect sense.  There should logically be some process through which younger, immature, selfish souls are very slow at manifestation.  Before they can be empowered with the enormous responsibilities that go along with faster abilities of manifestation, they should well have arrived at a point in their lives where they are naturally more concerned with others than with themselves.  They should have long since come to find as truth that happiness is not found in costly things, such as huge houses, filled with many pieces of expensive furniture.

Having arrived through difficult life experiences at these simple but obvious truths, the things that such people seek to manifest will rarely be for themselves, but in most cases, for others.  Consistently involving oneself in others, asking for the healing of other human being’s pain, for example, indicates that a soul is ready to handle the powers of manifestation carefully and prudently.

There is another corollary to the Law of Delay that should be mentioned.  And that is that the larger, the more intricate, and the more complex something is that is “asked for,” the longer it will take to manifest. This is easily seen in the evolutionary of life on Earth:  The gestation periods for higher life forms is invariably much longer than that for simple life forms.  For human beings, it is a full nine months.  For cetaceans, such as humpback whales who can sing highly complex songs over twenty minutes long, and repeat them note for note, the gestation period is about 11 months.  For dolphins it may be as long as 17 months. For elephants, one of the only animals to exhibit altruism—thinking of the welfare of other elephants before their own, and who bury their dead in ritualistic ways, the gestation period is 22 months.

The point is this:  If you are seeking to create something large and/or complex, expect there to be a long delay period.  Manifesting a soul mate, or a complex, high paying career, or gaining an advanced degree, may take years. Don’t let the delay period deter you. Don’t fall prey to impatience. Don’t be a fool and dig up your seeds to see if anything is happening with them, for you will invariably damage or kill the growing seedlings.

Parable 17:

The Great Supper

The Law of Generality

In this parable a woman plans a great dinner, and invites a great many people, some of them very important.  Alas, many of the invited guests send notice that they cannot attend for one reason or another.  It becomes obvious that few if any will attend her fancy banquet. And so, she says to her servents, go out into the streets and invite anyone and everyone that you can find.  They do so and the banquet is a roaring success, so much so that as it is going on she sends her servants out to find even more random people from the streets and her house is filled with happy and grateful guests.

This parable illustrates the Law of Generality, and it works like this:  Say you are seeking to manifest a companion, a life-partner, a soul mate.  You “invite,” or write down a great number of highly specific qualities that you want in your partner.  A great deal of time passes and you almost give up but you finally get what you asked for.  But in the process you may have spent five or ten years alone, some of your very best years that you could have spent happily communing with a wonderful partner. In addition, in being so specific you may have neglected to add certain qualities as “single” or “sober,” as was mentioned previously.  I have had clients who have had this precise thing happen to them.

They are not aware of it, but in taking the specific method of asking for what they want, they tie God’s hands at every turn.  For example, in merely asking for someone with blue eyes, you will eliminate about 80% of the available companions out there.  Each time you add another specific trait, you further narrow the pool of possibilities, making it harder and harder for the Universe to find what it is you think you want.

Another person goes at it another way.  She might ask for any person that God find suitable to make her happy and secure with a lasting successful relationship.  In this way, she is eliminating no one.  Every single person becomes a possibility and the Universe can do its job much more quickly and efficiently.  And, more importantly, you will end up happy, rather than with a rigidly defined physical or mental “type.”

The Law of Generality suggests that we widen the scope of our possibilities by inviting everyone to our banquet. In this way we let God find the way to the situations and circumstances that will get us where we really want to be:  Happy and fulfilled. Be very careful what you pray for.

Parable 18:

The Lost Sheep

The Law of Independence

This is a relatively well-known parable about a shepherd who has the responsibility to tend for about 100 sheep.  One of them runs off and gets lost.  The master asks the disciples, “Does he not leave the ninety-nine to go find the one?”  And when he has found it does he not rejoice, and call his friends and neighbors together to make a celebration of the find?

It is a trick question.  The normal interpretation of The Lost Sheep parable is that no matter how far you stray from the herd, God will go out of his way to find you and bring you home, and there will be great rejoicing.  I like this interpretation and it works well for many people.  However, when you stop to think deeply about it, there are some problems. Is there really any shepherd who has the responsibility for 100 sheep, who will knowingly risk 99% of them, for the wolves, and robbers to destroy the entire herd, in order to save one?  Of course not.  Unless, that is, there is something very special about that particular sheep.

This brings to mind a popular book called The Hundredth Monkey, by Ken Keyes. In it he describes an island with thousand of monkeys on it.  The researchers leave pieces of fruit and potatoes on the ground, in the sand, for the monkeys, and they seem to love this.  Except for the fact that they have to take a great deal of time and trouble cleaning off every grain of sand with their paws before they can eat.

The researchers find that one particular female monkey finds a simple solution to this problem. She takes the pieces of food to a nearby stream and easily washes them clean in the water.  What is most fascinating, is that she teaches this to the other monkeys who learn it quite handily.  But even more amazing, “miraculous?” is the fact that the researchers learn that on a number of islands many miles away in the ocean, monkeys start learning the same technique.  The hypothesis of the book is that when a certain critical mass of individuals in a group learn something important, new, and useful, that knowledge can spread, almost “telepathically,” or with what quantum physicists would call “non-locality.”

But there is a different way of looking at this.  The one monkey who figured the technique out, was called the hundredth monkey, the rare individual who rejected the herd behavior and made up her own way of doing things, a way that was clearly better. So it is with human beings.  Every so often, a rare individual comes along who can reject the “herd mentality” and make up a completely new and different way of doing things.  Statistically such individuals, who end up being inventors, innovative scientists and the like, are quite rare: One in a thousand or even a million individuals.

Now, think of what God “does for a living,” what is his pet project?  Obviously, it is the creation of ever increasingly intelligent and complex beings, beings who can become conscious enough to commune with him and help him create a better world for everyone.  He is a creator, but he allows creation to occur naturally, giving us free will so that we will choose the virtuous rather than have it forced upon us.  Such “tested” virtue, intentional virtue is real virtue.

In the process of evolution, it takes what is known as a beneficial mutation, for evolution to proceed. Mutations in nature are common, and most of them in a very bad way, and they quickly die off.  But, according to the study of the fossils remains on earth, every so very rarely a mutation comes along that is actually better at surviving than the other members of the species.  It reproduces, passes its traits along to its offspring and a new, more advanced species is born–and thrives with its superior abilities to adapt and cope with the environment and its natural obstacles to survival.

Now, think how useful such a super rare beneficial mutation would be to the Creator, who has spent billions of years trying to create ever more intelligent and successful beings. To Him it would be extremely precious. In the Parable of the Lost Sheep, the sheep that breaks free of the herd mentality and goes off on its own, is a metaphor for such a beneficial mutation.  It is a metaphor for that one in ten thousand or a million people that thinks out of the box, and in so doing solves a major problem, cures a major disease, invents a life-saving and work-saving device, or writes words that shake everything up and get people thinking in a new and better way, perhaps preventing entire wars or other problems.

Would the “shepherd” think such a super rare individual is precious enough to leave the rest of the “herd” to make sure that individual is “found,” “saved,” and brought back into the fold safely. Apparently, yes. What this parable is saying then, is that you should not be afraid to think in your own way, out of the box, to create and invent and think about, write about new and better ideas and ways of doing things.  You may at first appear “lost,” and the rest of the herd may find you insane or peculiar, even shun you.  But the parable indicates that if you stay the course, the Creator will not only make sure you survive, so that it will be possible to spread your ideas to the rest of the “herd,” that it too may evolve. In addition, the wording at the end suggests that you will be “celebrated” in some way when at last you are “found.”

Parable 19:

The Lost Coin

The Law of Potential

Here a woman has ten silver coins and loses one.  The teacher asks, “Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it? And when she does, does she not call her friends and neighbors together for a party to rejoice. At the end of the parable, there is an ostensibly fundamentalistic statement that “in the same way, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”

The Parable of the Lost Coin is the second of three consecutive parables about something that is lost and then found.  This one is different from the other two in that it talks about an inanimate object that is lost.  To understand the parable it is critical to examine closely what a coin really is for the teacher did not choose his words lightly.  A coin, or any kind of money, represents potential energy. If you trace carefully the source of any money, you will find that it represents some human being’s time and energy.

Thus, the parable of the lost coin is about a person losing part of his or her potential, perhaps some talent or ability that you have neglected.  The parable tells us to be like the woman, to do everything possible to recover that potential. We have all been given certain unique gifts, and it is imperative that we are conscious of these gifts, and maximize their potential as best we can.  Furthermore, when we do, we are to be elated, and make it a point to share our finding with those we love, those closest to us.

For example, perhaps you have always had an ability to sing fairly well.  Maybe you are not of “star” quality, and therefore neglect your talent and stop using it.  The parable suggests that you do everything in your power to recall and reclaim all of your talents and gifts, and to use them to your full potential.  Your talents, gifts and unique properties are highly valued by the Creator and He wants you to be appropriately appreciative of them, and maximize their potential by using them, refining them, and learning as much as you can about them. As for the last sentence about the “sinner” and “repentance,” the Greek word for “sin” is actually a term from archery and means, “to miss the mark.” The word used for “repent” is the Greek metaneo, which actually means, according to the dictionary, “to think differently afterwards, to reconsider.”

So the parable is about making a change in our consciousness; it will not be enough to be aware of the loss of potential, our inadequate stewardship of our gifts, and to reclaim them and rejoice with our friends.  We need to make a complete shift in our perceptions of ourselves.  We need to see ourselves—even if by comparison to some gigantic idol on TV we have very modest abilities—as our own stars, our own “gifted” individuals.  Of course, there is always the danger of narcissism or conceit in doing such a thing—the ego is always to be watched with a close eye—but the parable is indicating that we are to go ahead and take appropriate, “right-sized” pride in ourselves and our unique characteristics.

To activate the parable, make a comprehensive inventory of every talent, ability, and kind of knowledge and skill that you possess.  Be like the woman in the house, be extremely thorough so that you cannot possibly miss anything, even on the floor—a symbol for the most humble aspects of ourselves.

Meditate upon these qualities and see if you are using all of them to their maximum potential.  Try to recall if you had any kind of talent or gift, however modest, earlier in your life, which you have abandoned and is lying dormant.  Then, to reinforce your discoveries, make a point of inviting some friends and family over and sharing your discoveries with them. Yes, some of them will think you are being egotistical or crazy, but pay no attention to them.  Celebrate yourself and be happy that you have all these abilities, and suggest to everyone else that they do the same.  Finally, get into action and start using those neglected talents and skills, getting as good as you can at them, learning as much as you can and putting these skills to use in some way.

Parable 20:

The Prodigal Son

The Law of Entanglement

This is also one of the most famous of parables.  And, incredibly complex.  This retranslation only seems to scratch the surface.  A man has two sons.  He divides all his wealth exactly in half and gives each son half of the energy and resources that he has.  One of the sons then takes his portion and heads off for a foreign land and “squanders his wealth in wild living.”  Now he was poor, and was forced to take a menial job, feeding pigs.  He began to wonder, “Even these pigs eat better than I do,” but no one would even give him any of the pig’s food to eat.

After a while he comes to his senses, and thinks, “Even my father’s hired men have food to spare.  I’ll go back to him, humble myself, and ask his forgiveness.  But he felt so bad about how he had acted that he figured that he wasn’t even worthy to be called his father’s son anymore.  He decided to go back home and ask his father if he could at least be one of his hired men. So, he traveled back home, and while he was still a long way off, his father recognized him and ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him, he was so glad to see him.

The son said, “Father, I have sinned against Heaven and Earth, and am no longer worthy to be your son.”  But his father told the servants to bring the best robe, and put a beautiful ring on his finger, and sandals on his feet. He told the servants to kill the fatted calf—an enormous luxury saved for only the most special occasions at that time—and told everyone to have a feast and celebrate.

The older son was in the field, working as he was expected to as usual, and he heard the singing and dancing. When he found out about his father’s reaction to the errant son’s return, he was quite angry and refused to have any part in the celebration.  The father went out to him and pleaded with him to come in.  He said, quite understandably—and this is the part that is sometimes left out because it is difficult to explain using standard interpretations of the parable—“Look.  All these years I have been working hard and reliably like I was supposed to, and never disobeyed a single one of your orders. Yet you never gave me even a goat, much less the fatted calf so I could have a celebration with my friends. The father tried to explain to him, “My son, you have always been with me and everything I have is already yours.  But we need to celebrate and be happy because your brother, who we thought was dead and gone, has returned.”

Now, the standard interpretations of this parable are fairly straightforward, and I would hasten to add at the outset, that these interpretations are perfectly valid.  Some of the finest people I have ever known and worked with were quite fundamentalistic, and this approach obviously works quite well for some. The standard interpretations are that the wayward son represents us, as “sinners,” who have strayed from the path at some point in our past.   But when we humble ourselves and return to our Father in Heaven, he will be extremely glad to see us.  It is a way of saying, “Don’t worry.  Even if you are very far from the truth and have committed many terrible sins, you will still be welcomed back into the fold, if you will but humble yourself.  And as the father ran towards the son, so the saying goes: If you will take but one step towards God, he will take ten towards you. This is all true and of great benefit to know.

The problem is that if you stick with this interpretation of the metaphor you are left with a very sticky and nonsensical problem.  For with this interpretation suggests that if you have lived a life of perfect adherence to all the laws and expectations of God, and have been good all your life, when a sinner comes back home, you will be rather set aside and will receive no particular reward.  All the while, the sinners will be receiving great attention and special rewards.  This is a somewhat nonsensical and “unfair” idea that leads one to wonder if there might be another way of interpreting the metaphor, so that it makes more sense.  As it turns out there are not one but several levels of meaning conveyed within this enigmatic allegory.

One of these is that the parable is talking about what happens within your own mind, as it is making its way to higher consciousness, God consciousness. We have already learned about meditation, and that it is the process of watching one’s thoughts, in an unattached way, and thus “centering” or “grounding” the mind so that, through practice, its relatively wayward and random thoughts will become more and more calm and orderly. Eventually, we are told in many spiritual traditions, that through meditation we can ultimately reach “enlightenment” or what is called in the East, “samadhi.”

So, the wayward son represents our thoughts straying from our center.  If this interpretation is followed, then it means that no matter how errant and wild our thoughts are, they can always, always return to a state of calm, and that this will produce a state of happiness and joy.

Every one who practices meditation will tell you that their mind is constantly wandering off, and that meditation is, for all practical purposes, a perpetual project that the higher mind needs to practice, in order to achieve true centeredness, true stillness.  In that stillness, the still, small voice of God can be heard.  And when God can be heard, an infinite amount of information can be conveyed. A second interpretation, which may be the most interesting for some people, is that the teacher was attempting to illustrate within this parable, one of the Great Quantum Mysteries, Entanglement, and how it acts, what import it has for people going through their real lives.

To begin explaining this interpretation of the metaphor, let’s look first at what happens at the quantum level when the process called entanglement occurs.  And this has been well proven by multiple experiments: At the atomic level, it is possible under certain conditions, to separate one particle into two. Each of these contains exactly half the energy of the “parent” particle.   What is interesting about these two separated particles is that they remain “linked,” they “know,” – and even physicists have difficulty finding a better word for that — what the other particle is doing.  And this knowing happens between the particles even if they are separated by very long distances.  Quantum physics predicted this phenomena but it has long since been proven by carefully executed, and fully-repeatable studies.  This linkage between the particles is so strong, and so indestructible, that it remains even if the particles are separated for centuries and by many billions of light years across time and space.

Moreover, to make the phenomena even more mysterious, this “knowing” between the particles occurs instantaneously, far greater than the speed of light.   Some physicists refer to this as non-locality, as we mentioned. Non-locality means that certain phenomena may be linked even if they are not in the same locale, something that completely defies scientific common sense.

Yet, this phenomena, or some variation or part of it may explain such things as why a mother might awaken at exactly a certain minute and second in the middle of the night in America with a vivid perception of her son in trouble, only to find later that it was exactly at the moment her son died, in Europe or Asia in a plane crash or war.  Cases such as these have been documented for years.  There are many other apparently “paranormal” phenomena which might, in fact, rely upon the phenomena of non-locality.  They are not then, “paranormal,” but in actuality natural processes, thought to be paranormal simply because there was no known mechanism to explain them at the time.

Consider exactly what happens in the parable.  A father and his wife, give birth to two sons.  In the parable, is it a mere coincidence that the two sons are each given exactly one half of the father’s total wealth—just like entangled particles are “given” exactly one half of the energy of the “parent” particle?

The author will not pretend to be able to explain the entire metaphor presented by this parable.  It is so long and so complex in its wording that it still remains a mystery, if deciphered using the quantum phenomena of “entanglement” as a model.  But we do know, that according to the standard axiom, “As above so below, and as below so above:” that things work at the macro level in analogous ways that things act at the micro or even atomic or subatomic levels.  Is it not intuitively thought by many people that human souls can become “entangled” together, through birth, or through love, or other processes, such that the are forever linked in some mysterious way, at some level?

If this is true, then the parable seems to say that, once two souls are entangled by some profound process, even if they are separated by time, space, or even death, that they will somehow mysteriously and inexplicably “find” each other someday, and in some way.  Two people who have been deeply in love often have a deep and abiding feeling that this is surely true, and that even if death separates them, that they will be reunited again, even if that occurs in the afterlife.  And that when this reunion occurs that there will be great joy and celebration.

Thinking Out of the Box: Remember what we talked about in the Parable of the Lost Sheep?  That a person who thinks out of the box, who strays away from the herd mentality, will eventually be honored and reunited with the rest of the flock?  The prodigal son is much like the lost sheep.  Perhaps he even symbolizes the teacher, who most clearly thought in a completely new and different way than every one in his world, every one in history.

If this interpretation of the allegory presented by the parable is correct, then the “loose end” of the disgruntled “good” son, the one who always did exactly what was expected of him, always acted in perfect accordance with the existing concepts of what was good and right, is now explained.

In such an interpretation, the prodigal son, follows his heart and goes out into the world.  In doing so, he is confronted with temptation, succumbs to it, and finds out the hard way, that this is not the right way to live.  The good son, by contrast, who does stay at home and never is subject to temptation, then represents a person who has what is known as “untested virtue.”  The prodigal son gets “lost” in his wild ways, but in the end chooses by his own free will to humble himself, to come back home, and try to live a decent life.  His father, who might be thought to represent God, finds this “tested” son, who by his own free will chooses to come back home, more valuable now than his untested son, and he is aptly rewarded.

If this interpretation is followed along, then it would seem to suggest that as was indicated in the parable of the Lost Sheep that in real life, people sometimes act the same way, especially early in their lives, and do what is unexpected of them, sometimes getting into trouble.  But how many of us have known such a person, who found out the hard way that this was not the right thing to do and, having his virtue tested, comes through in the end and using his or her free will returned “home?”  Those of us who have known such a person know that he or she is a very valuable soul indeed.  That person knows what temptation is like, how to choose to come away from it, and in the final analysis is able to help other people who are lost or otherwise in pain, in a much more knowledgeable and compassionate way.

And, as can well be said, it is the learning of true compassion that is the purpose of life itself.  Compassion, as anyone knows can only be developed in one way.  And that is by suffering.  When we choose the wrong way, we almost always end up in great pain, go through that pain, and come out the other end as a truly beautiful soul, one who possesses uncommon wisdom.  People who are confused, tempted, or in pain naturally gravitate towards such a soul, for they know that worldly, experienced person who has overcome its own difficulties, will understand them and be able to offer true empathy, sincere and heartfelt understanding, and excellent personally-gained knowledge of how to get back on the path.

And does the parable seem to predict that once entangled, particles, perhaps even souls, will always find their way back across time and space, across the universe to be with one another again?  In the end, will all lost loves be found?

Parable 21:

The Unjust Steward

The Law of Conservation

In this, another somewhat lengthy and complex allegory, a rich man has a man who manages and oversees his possessions.  He gets in trouble with his master and is quite upset, realizing that he is too old to go out and find a new job, perhaps one requiring manual labor. So, he begins thinking what he can do to please his master, show him that he is wise and effective in order to protect his job. He calls in every one who owes his master a debt.  He offers every one of the debtors a chance to repay the debt at a reduced rate, but in doing so, be completely forgiven his entire debt.  Every one of the debtors sees they have a great opportunity to resolve their debt at a reduced rate, and takes the manager up on his proposition.  In doing so, the manager settles a number of old and difficult to collect debts.  In hearing of this, the master is very pleased.  He thinks the manager has acted shrewdly and has reflected well upon him as a generous man. Instead of firing him, he says to him, “you who have been worthy of trusting a few things, should be trusted now with even more.”  He not only keeps his job, but receives a raise and even more responsibility.

At first glance, the parable seems to be about stewardship, a subject many metaphysical experts are rightly concerned with.  We know that the Universe, God, is greatly concerned with how we handle the gifts that have been given to us.  We can see this reflected in the human body and other living organisms.  It is impossible for a bumblebee, when analyzed by engineers on “paper” to fly.  But by being extremely efficient in its use of energy, its metabolism, it is able to not only to fly but fly with astonishing grace and agility.  Life on earth, as we have noted, consists of organisms that contain many trillions of cells. When studied by thermodynamics experts, a very good case can be made that life itself, the fantastic amount of order that life requires, not only to exist, but to ever improve and evolve is, in pure mathematical terms highly unlikely to be possible, and is even by some calculations completely impossible. The physical universe is hardly weighted towards a state of order, but via the process known as entropy, is strongly predisposed to become ever disordered.  The way that the powerful forces of entropy and disorder, are overcome and allow life to exist and evolve, are due to the fact that living organisms are incredibly efficient. In other words they use every single iota of energy they take in with such little waste that they are able to exist in a utterly improbable world loaded with disorder.

The act of stewardship is the act of handling the resources with which we are presented.  The way we use our gifts, talents, abilities, money, energy, time, authority, and responsibilities is seemingly monitored by the Creator.  And those who use what they have intelligently and generously, and reflect well upon “the master” are rewarded.  According to the parable, if this is indeed the correct interpretation, those who use the resources given to them very efficiently and very well are actually given more, entrusted with more.

We also know from the Parable of the Leaven, that the Universe we live within has seemingly been imbued with a kind of “substance,” which, although as yet undetectable by science, causes things to automatically expand, particularly when they are given conscious attention. The parable might seem a little ominous if thought about deeply.  It seems to indicate, at least on the surface, that we will be judged by the way we have managed the resources that we have been entrusted with.  And how many of us have truly maximized our potentials?  Doing so would require an enormous amount of almost constant effort and “overachieving” consciousness.

But there is a way out of this predicament.  For what the parable really says is that if we, like the manager in the story, forgive others, and make it easy as possible for them to “square their ‘debts,” God will think us wise, considerate, and prudent.  As his representatives, we reflect well upon him with our generosity and forgiveness.  This is just one more parable to show how incredibly important the teacher thought the process of forgiveness really is and how we should make conscious efforts, every day, to keep this in mind and put it into practice.  Then, we will be entrusted with even more.  It is a parable about how to get ahead in life by…forgiving.

Parable 22:

The Rich Man and Lazarus

The Law of Compensation

Wow.  Talk about a complex parable…The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus is one of the longest and most complex metaphors devised by the teacher.  I was hardly certain that I had truly unraveled it to its core.  But one thing that does become clear in retranslating the parable is that it is about the Law of Compensation. Briefly, the parable talks about a rich man, and a beggar named Lazarus—which in Greek means “one who has been helped by God.” (He is not the Lazarus that was raised from the dead).   The beggar spends his time sitting near the gate to the rich man’s estate hoping that, by mere proximity, he might perhaps be noticed and helped in some way.  But, he is not noticed and never helps.  The rich man never goes out of his way to help him in any way, even though he passes by him perhaps multiple times a day coming and going to his estate. In time, both men die.

The rich man, according to standard translations, goes to “hell.”  However, if you look up the Greek word that is used, which is hades, Strong’s Concordance simply indicates this means “an unknown place.” Nothing more.  It does not mean “hell,” plain and simple.  There is no hell, and an enlightened man like the teacher would never have espoused such a frightening and absurd principle.  We know that from the second parable.  The only hells that exist are the ones we create for ourselves.  And we can be very good at doing just that, particularly by failing to take notice of those suffering in our world, and making a decent effort to help them.  In this “unknown place,” the rich man, now stripped of his worldly possessions is in anguish and has a conversation with Abraham. Abraham tells the suffering soul that he received his wealth while he was alive, but failed to notice or help the poor man though it would have been incredibly easy for him to do so.  Now the beggar is in heaven, in a state of bliss.

As said, the metaphor is complex and very difficult to condense.  It is suggested you read the entire chapter on this in The Hidden Parables if you want to get a larger sense of what the allegory is about.  But even there the author did not feel as though he entirely unraveled all of the meaning of the metaphor. Perhaps the only way to condense the parable is to simply say that it is about the Law of Compensation.  The great philosopher Emerson wrote one of his most famous essays on Compensation.  It can easily be found on the Internet, and you are strongly urged to read it, at this exact point in your studies—take 15minutes to Google and read it–for it is truly great wisdom, articulated in a particularly elegant way. Very practical common sense from a great a wise man.

In this essay, Emerson talks about the rather pendulous nature of the world—that it can very often swing from one extreme to the other.  In fact, he goes so far as to say that when he is being criticized and ravaged in the press, or going through other hard times, he is actually somewhat exhilarated.  Because he knows that the “pendulum” will invariably swing to the other side and, in due course, his critics will be seen for what they really are.  He will be compensated for his perseverance in staying the path and teaching the truth for what it is.

Taoism and other similar philosophical approaches also voice a similar worldview—that nature and our lives, inevitably cycle through series of phases, ups and downs, ins and outs, and that this is just the way things are.  What is interesting about this parable is that seems to suggest that there is a way out of this inevitable up and down cycling.  It says that no, you do not necessarily have to cycle through a down phase if you know how to live your life the right way.  It says that if, when your are up, you make sure to pay attention to the needs of others who might be “down and out,” and take the time and energy necessary to help them, you can break out of this cycle and avoid the sometimes extreme downs life dishes out.

It is another parable about generosity and giving, and how powerful they are as tools to improve your life and the lives of others around you.  This theme is reiterated so frequently by the teacher in his conditions of a miracle and in his parables in differing ways, that it would seem that it is one of the most, if not the very most, powerful thing we can do:  Pay attention to others, and help others in need.

To activate this parable, make it a habit to take careful, thoughtful inventory of where you are in the cycles of life.  When you are in a phase of abundance, growth, and relative ease, make absolutely sure that you use this time to take special care, develop a heightened sense of awareness of how others that are metaphorically “sitting outside your gates” taking conscious care to notice them and do something to help them.  This obviously has to do with crises of a global nature, but also applies especially well to the people who are right around you in your daily life.  Don’t just sit there, do something, and make it a habit to continue doing so on a daily basis and your life will improve.

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Parable 23

The Unprofitable Servants

The Law of Service

In this parable, it is often neglected to note that the teacher begins with the famous phrase, “If you had only faith as large as a mustard seed, you could ask a huge tree to move and it would be moved.”  He then goes on to explain what “faith” really is—something about it that we have to know or we can’t get it to really work.  He goes on to describe workers who are asked to do many tasks and even work overtime.  At the end of the day however, they feel unrewarded, and lapse into a state of dissatisfaction.

The allegory is telling us that we have to have faith in order to do what we want to do in this world but that faith in inextricably linked to the process of service.  If you want to get the power of faith to move mountains you have to serve others.  That is the key.  When we serve God, we may not see the fruits of our labors “at the end of the day” and feel ungrateful as though no one has noticed, no one cares. But, the teacher is telling us, that in the process of serving God and humanity, acting humbly as a servant and doing what we know is right and best to make the world a better place, and simultaneously exercising the spiritual muscle of faith, that faith is activated such that even the tiniest amount of it becomes an extraordinarily powerful force.  Faith is a process of work, unselfish action, and is refined, like uranium, into an incredibly powerful commodity when the process of service is continually and consistently applied.

We have to rather resign ourselves to the fact that we are on God’s “time clock,” all the time.  There is no “end to our work day” where we can slack off and stop bothering about the laws of the universe, the processes of right and wrong, generosity, and particularly service.

“Power” is something that can be misunderstood and used for selfish and foolish egotistical ways.  Power is the ability to change things.  And right or wrong, deny it or not, we spend a lot of lives as human beings gaining more power.  For example, knowledge is power.  And the knowledge within this parable is that spiritual power, faith, in inextricably linked to the process of unselfish and pretty much constant service.  It’s a chicken and egg kind of spiral.  The more faith we have, the more power we have, the more power we have the more effective and miraculous service we can perform, and the more service we perform the more we refine that infinitely precious thing called faith– which can move mountains, heal disease, correct lack, lead you to the right place at the right time, and in short, make you both happy and helpful at the simultaneously.

Parable 24:

The Importunate Widow

The Law of Persistence

In this parable there is a judge who “fears neither heaven or earth,” a metaphor for the sometimes dispassionate, almost random forces of nature and society that seem to randomly swirl around us.  A certain widow seeks justice from this judge, but he will not give it to her, because he just doesn’t care.  But she persists: No matter what the judge says and no matter how indifferent he seems, she keeps coming back to him over and over.  Finally, the uncaring judge gives in, saying in effect, “even though I don’t care, I will grant this woman justice, if for nothing else, so that she will just stop bothering me.”

This is an allegory for the seemingly random and “unfair” forces of nature that don’t seem to be governed by anything else than the laws that the bigger fish with the bigger teeth win in the fight for survival of the fittest.  What the parable says is that even though we live in a universe of seemingly mindless entropy filled with competitive, uncaring hypocrites, if we persist in seeking justice, that justice will come to us, and we will win out. Next to faith, persistence, according to every expert from the ancients to the most cutting-edge self-help gurus, is one of the most powerful characteristics you can possibly  develop and exercise as a spiritual being working on Earth.

Keep at your prayers, your visualizations, your attempts to forgive, and your love, and you will prevail.  Never give up.  Just keep going.  Don’t let anything, particularly yourself and your doubts, stop you.  Don’t let a lack of apparent results stop you.  All the great inventors, creators, builders, and artist, geniuses of this world were masters of persistence.  They never let anything or anyone stop them, they never listened to anyone who told them what they were doing was impossible, they never gave up.  And they won.

Parable 25:

The Pharisees and the Publicans

The Law of Humility

The parable goes like this, the teacher is addressing a group apparently known for their conceit and their over confidence in their spiritual superiority. Yep.  This has been going on for thousands of years.  Nothing new, to say the least. He tells them a little story.  In it he first speaks to a Pharisee, strictly defined as: “A member of an ancient Jewish sect, distinguished by strict observance of the traditional and written law, and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity.  Generally, a self-righteous person; a hypocrite.”

This guy is speaking loudly, in the center of the temple, thanking God that he was not like all the “sinners,” the murders and thieves and so forth.  At the same time another man, a tax collector, considered to be the lowest of the low, stood far back from the crowd unseen, beating his breast and saying, “God, have mercy on me for I have completely missed the mark (sinned).”  The teacher ends with the succinct statement, “everyone who exalts himself before God will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exulted.  A statement echoed in the Sermon on the Mount:  And the meek shall inherit the Earth.

A bit of a corollary to the Law of Compensation:  The pendulum will swing.  And if you want it to swing back and hit you over the head, send it out by thinking highly of yourself, and speaking highly of yourself.  Pretty standard stuff, spiritually speaking, but worthy of its own parable as it cannot be left out of any comprehensive series of spiritual lessons.

But before beginning the series of steps you can take to set this parable lesson into action, let’s talk about the concept of “right-sizedness.”  One of my best spiritual advisers ever, Brad Sykes, used to tell me about this all the time.  Metaphorically, it was a way of keeping the pendulum from swinging dangerously one way or the other.  In Buddhist terms it was about taking the middle path. Right-sizedness is the idea of looking at one’s self accurately and without ego—neither positive or negative ego.

We all have faults to be sure.  And we can list them to our heart’s content.  But we all have our strong points too.  A correct, healthy self image will simply be dispassionate and accurate:  Acknowledging one’s obvious and hidden weaknesses and faults openly, while at the same time, dispassionately, logically looking at one’s strengths is “the Way.”  Balance. There is strength in balance, stability, solidity, even beauty. Grace.  To attract Grace, be Grace.

Activating the Law of Humility:

1) Time to make another inventory. This time make a thorough, basically brutal list of every way, shape and form that you feel superior to every person, institute, way of thinking, race, creed, and color, country, and political figure/institute. Be so thorough so that nothing escapes you. There is beauty in this, even Grace.  And if you seek Grace in your life, you must be Grace.

2) Acknowledge that you cannot do this by yourself. Because your ego is involved, the great trickster, you are literally going to need divine intervention.  Literally sit down and actively ask God into your process.  God can and will help you.  In fact, it could be said that he loves to help people with such a process. It’s one of his favorite things to do, I’m told.

3) Begin to think differently, humbling yourself to God, asking for his guidance in this process.  Act differently, speak differently, in such a way that you only speak kind words, only kind and respectful words particularly to those you have the most intense feelings of superiority.  Proactively go out of your way to come in contact with these people and groups, and figure out ways that you can actually become respectful of them, even help them if need be.

The power of this exercise is beyond your imagination.  Shifting your perception, as A Course in Miracles tells us, is a huge part of the miraculous. Through this exercise you will begin to feel truly worthy of the miraculous.  Ego, superiority, is really only vain insecurity.  When you can attain, and through active work, maintain it, you will begin to feel that deep worthiness—to build, have, create, and be those things you have always dreamt of.  And, hand in hand with God, you will find the world you have always been looking for.  In this way, you will find home.

Parable 26

The Laborers in the Vineyard

The Law of Tunneling.

In this most interesting of parables, there is a man who needs a great deal of work done in his vineyards, and it must be done by midnight. So, he sets his men to work immediately.  He tells them that he will pay them an extra wage, a bonus if they complete their task on time. But it soon becomes obvious that they alone will not be able to complete the work nearly on time.  So, he sends men out into the public to recruit other workers.  They are given an even better deal.  Even though they start later and will have to work fewer hours, they will be paid the same healthy wage if they finish their work on time. This goes on until it becomes close to midnight.  He then offers new men an incredible deal:  If they help assure the work is completed by midnight, they too will receive the same bonus as the men who started in the morning even though they might have to work only an hour or two.

The work is completed and the men line up to receive their reward.  The vineyard owner has the ones who started last receive their pay first. The ones who started the earliest are paid last.  But, They are all paid the same amount, a very good day’s earnings for everyone indeed.  Rather understandably, the men who started early in the morning begin to grumble.  “It is not fair,” they say.  Why should those who came very late and only worked an hour be paid the same as those who started early? The master asks them a very fair question, “Do you not feel that you are getting a very generous reward for your work? You did in the morning.  It is my money. Don’t I have the right to be generous?”  And then, the parable ends with a very strange and paradoxical statement: “And so the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”

To begin our interpretation let’s take a close look at this last line. Although it is very widely quoted and seems to explain a number of processes that occur in life, the majority of Biblical scholars believe it was added later and not actually spoken by the teacher.  It is too long to explain why this is thought to be true in this condensed version, but suffice it to say that the fact that the last men hired were paid first is seems entirely irrelevant to the lesson.  And if the traditional interpretation is followed, which is that it is never too late to come back home, to “repent” and come back to God and help him with his work, it makes absolutely no sense that those who spent their entire lives laboring like saints to help others would be “paid last.”  So, for now, let us interpret the parable without that strange line.

Tunneling

One of the great quantum mysteries has been well-established for many decades and is hardly theory.  It is the basis for the way all semi-conductors work, starting with the first invented, transistors. It works like this:  Imagine that there are two tennis balls on the floor.  They are exactly the same distance to the wall on the other side of the room.  Both have spring-loaded starters behind them that will go off at exactly the same moment and deliver exactly the same amount of force to the two tennis balls.  One of the balls has an absolutely flat path to the other side of the room.  But the other tennis ball has a barrier in front it, a bump or hill, that is constructed just so.  So that when the tennis ball reaches it, it rolls up the side, but just barely cannot get over the top.  The question is, which tennis ball gets to the other side of the room the fastest?

Obviously in a linear, Newtonian world, the tennis ball with the flat clear path will reach the wall first.  The other will not make it at all, for it cannot quite go over the crest of the bump in front of it.  But in the Quantum World, things work differently.  If two electrons are placed in an exactly analogous “race” where one has a free and clear path and the other has a barrier, a resistance in front of it that is just barely strong enough to repel it, something really, really strange happens.  And, mind you, this is not mere theory.  Every electronic device that you own from your car to your alarm clock that has a chip in it, works because of this phenomena. It’s quite real.

In the quantum world, when the electron reaches the bump, and rises up the side until it reaches the “top” that is just barely too high for it, it actually disappears. Disappears from this universe for a tiny fraction of a nanosecond.  And then, it reappears on the other side of the bump, instantaneously, as if it had “tunneled through it.”  Because it disappears and then reappears instantaneously, it is at that point moving faster than the speed of light, faster than the other electron with the free and clear path, and thus “beats” the free electron, arriving at the destination a fraction of a nanosecond before the other electron.  A very, very useful phenomena that allows scientists and inventors of all kinds the ability to devise incredibly efficient, extraordinarily tiny, and amazing devices that were only a figment of science fiction writer’s minds sixty or seventy years ago. So?  In this light, was the teacher’s last statement about the last being first and so forth, really an error?

But what you may well ask, has this to do with any practical level of human beings, human lives? It goes back to the standard principle, “As above so below etc.”  To understand how this applies to human life, first consider that if life is a kind of “race” then what…

To answer the question, we must first ask, if life is a “race” what is the goal, the final destination? Depending upon your world view, it might be “The guy that dies with the most toys wins.”  But in the world of Spirit, this is not the right answer.  The goal of the Universe, of God, is to create conscious beings who are loving, compassionate, selfless, empathetic, and sensitive to the needs of others.  And although it is sometimes irksome to admit, the only way, the only way mind you, to achieve compassion, is through suffering–through conquering pain and adversity.  In this light, a person who is born with a handicap, or in poverty, or with other obstacles, and who conquers these adversities through perseverance, suffering perhaps, and faith, “beats” the people who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths—who never have to work hard at anything to get everything.  We can all think of countless examples of children of wealth and means who end up shallow and narcissistic.  And, we can all think of examples of people who were born with incredible obstacles, almost insurmountable, who overcame these obstacles and became people of great depth and character and compassion.  Think of Helen Keller who was both blind and deaf but became an extraordinary scholar and writer.  The list goes on and on.

In the race for life, this parable is attempting to articulate the fact that those who break through adversity, fight for their accomplishments, end up being the highest souls.

In this spiritual light, the phrase, “And so the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” makes perfect sense.  For you, it means that no matter what obstacle lies before you, if you persist, you may very well “tunnel” though that obstacle and end up being a very high soul with great depth and compassion.

This concludes the first edition of The Miracle Worker’s Handbook. Obviously, we need to proof it and make a few other refinements before we electronically and physically publish it.  Additionally, several more parables need to be completed, but this will soon be accomplished.

We have set a goal of producing 1000 pocket sized, ultra low cost, but elegant copies of the final edition.  A PDF electronic booklet is being published shortly. If you feel this information is has been of value to you, think about it.  How much is it  really worth?   If you would like to help in seeing it disseminated, in a completely non-profit way, donations are being accepted of any amount, and should be mailed to:

Rev. Dr. Todd Michael

5910 West Lincoln Way   #305

Ames, Iowa

50014

The money will be handled impeccably.  Donors will be noted at the back of every book.  Obviously, if anyone can understand even a fraction of what these lessons teach, it would be absurd to imagine a penny could be used for any other purpose. The money will ONLY be used to disseminate the truth and no profit of any kind will ever be made.  And you can be part of it. You will receive a personal thank you note, and a copy of the first edition, signed, through the mail as soon as they come out.  We thank you in advance for your faith, confidence, and your foresight in this matter.

Many blessings, Dr. Todd

Biography: Rev. Dr. Todd Michael is a 60 year-old, retired trauma and emergency physician. He worked 20 years as a physician, 10 in under-served areas, and then three in the ministerial field.  He is the author of 17 books, three published by Tarcher/Penguin in New York as a matched set.  His books are in seven languages, his undergraduate degree is in psychology, and he was admitted to the Mensa Society in 1985.  He spends his days now as a dedicated life-coach (515) 450 0831, as a fine-arts painter — and spending time with his life partner Dr. Jin, and with his family, Nancy and Matt, in his home town of Ames, Iowa.  Although disabled, he continues to produce spiritual literature and his life’s goal is to reach as many people as he can with his books, CDs, and blogs at DrToddMichael.NET–and to acquire a service dog to help him with his life.  He can be reached at:

EvolutionAngel55@gmail.com –  and all emails are answered personally.

This concludes the first edition of The Miracle Worker’s Handbook. The final three parables will arrive shortly thus completing the book.

To book a personal session, please address an email to EvolutionAngel55@gmail.com.

Many true blessings to you, Dr. Todd

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