Successful Living: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SELF- MASTERY AND SUCCESSFUL LIVING

AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

Several years ago I heard a story about how the world seemed to be in a bit of a mess and so God decided to hold a board meeting with his top angels. When one angel complained about the sad state of affairs God silenced him by saying, If you don’t like the world the way it is, go and make a better one.

The message is very clear. If we don’t like our world the way it is, only we can change it. No one else can do if for us for one very simple reason – we created it.

Each of us creates our own world through our thoughts, feelings and actions and so the world not only looks different, but is different for each of us.

Regardless of where in the world we live we find that although many education systems teach a wide variety of subjects ranging from the arts and sciences to agricultural, industrial and homemaking subjects, very rarely are we taught the basics of living.

In today’s commercially-driven world practically everything we buy comes with an instruction manual included. It doesn’t matter if it’s a car, television set, household appliance or any other gadget, there’s usually a step-by-step instruction book either in the box, tucked away in the glove compartment, or downloadable from the Internet.

Unfortunately we aren’t given an instruction manual for life at the moment of birth or even at school. There are no obvious instructions to lead us through the transition from school to how to succeed in life.

So what is it that most people really want help with?

Isn’t it ‘How to survive and to know how to get on in the world’?

Perhaps we want to know how to survive a relationship that ends through death, divorce or separation. And then there’s that monster that none of us wants to face: rejection – how do we survive that?

And what about co-dependency? And how do we cope with the feeling that, No one loves me?

How do we solve problems such as these? How do we enter into the ‘right relationship’? How, in fact, do we know what the ‘right relationship’ is?

Until now the only instruction book that many of us have had comprises our parents and teachers who’ve either, ‘been there, done that, got the tshirt’, or who’ve just turned a blind eye because they didn’t know the answers either.

In most cases their advice is based on how they coped in their own formative years and this is how beliefs, habits and advice are passed down from generation to generation without check.

There has to be another way. There is! That’s why this book is called SUCCESSFUL LIVING. It’s an essential instruction manual to self- development and to living life more fully, meaningfully and successfully.

The manuscript is certainly not designed to duplicate or negate the work of the many caring and helpful support groups which can be found worldwide, but gives practical instruction on how to avoid pitfalls in the first place.

Let’s start, therefore, by looking at how things get to be the way they are. Then chapter by chapter we’ll consider the essential steps to improvement and fulfilment.

Neil A. Mence

London, 2012

PART 1

SOME OF THE THINGS WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO FIND OUT

CHAPTER 1

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Why do things seem to go wrong? + The Law of Attraction + Quantum Mechanics + Thoughts are things + The Law of Life + Beliefs + The creative process + Types of thought.

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Let’s start by asking, Why do things sometimes seem to go wrong and what should we do when that happens?

If it’s a health problem we’ll probably go to a doctor or a hospital to have things checked out. If it’s financial we usually try to borrow, work extra hours or do something else to acquire more money.

But what happens if we’ve just been laid off or fired? An immediate result could be the prospect of financial ruin, of not having enough money to be self-supporting or to look after those dependent on us.

And what if we’re suddenly faced with a health challenge – perhaps a lifethreatening one such as cancer, HIV, a stroke or a heart attack?

What if there’s an unexpected pregnancy to deal with?

There are countless ‘what if ‘questions or ‘what do I do now’ situations that we may face during the course of our lives. And since we don’t have an instruction manual to guide us, many of us spend days, weeks, months, years or perhaps a whole lifetime thrashing around not knowing what to do and digging ourselves into an ever-deepening hole.

When we consider the question, What’s life all about?, we need first to understand who we are and what our role is in determining what happens in our lives. When we know these two things we’re in a position to change what we no longer want to experience.

The Law of Attraction

Most people understand what the Law of Attraction is regardless of the variety of names we give it -- the law of cause and effect, mental equivalents, the law of thought, the law of mind, even supply and demand. A good working definition is ‘whatever we think and believe is somehow drawn to us through the power of our belief’. Throughout this book we’ll come up with various ways of using this Law to attract what we do want rather than what we don’t want.

Let’s collapse all these definitions of the ‘Law of Attraction’ into one and call it ‘the Law of Life’ because in reality it’s the Law that governs every aspect of living. It guarantees that we can produce our own unique blueprint for life.

The basic premise of the Law of Life is that there’s an invisible creative energy or life-force that’s always present and somehow acts upon our believing thoughts and words to reproduce their identical equivalent in our outer experiences. Thoughts filled with emotion, regardless of whether they’re positive or negative, are an unseen rush of energy that goes out from us attracting their counterparts back into our lives as experience.

The obvious questions, of course, are, What is this creative energy?, Where does it come from?, and What does it look like?

I doubt that anyone can truly answer these questions. I certainly don’t understand how the Law works; I just know from experience that it does.

Quantum Mechanics

The basic Theory of Quantum Mechanics is that everything in the universe is made of energy and the first Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can never be created or destroyed; it just is. This might appear to contradict the Big Bang Theory which postulates that everything (both matter and energy) was created in a millionth of a millisecond from the eruption of a particle of matter so minute it couldn’t be observed.

Quantum mechanics describes everything as a wave and that each identifiable thing within that wave is a particle -- a droplet of the wave that exists only when it’s seen as it individualises. This means that a subatomic particle has to be observed in order for it to exist.

In other words, a subatomic particle is ‘created’ by observation or, in human terms, by judgement. The wave is all there is; it’s a unified ‘oneness’ but at the particle level we have two components -- the observer and the observed. And so in this respect the metaphysical claim that life is an illusion created out of our ‘seeing’ has some validity.

The logical conclusion of all this is that everything that is (including us) or has ever been, is somehow made out of this one unlimited energy. It follows, then, that each of us is somehow both a part of and made out of this universal energy.

Now this is a rather incredible thought because it would follow that we can direct this energy since we are immersed in and one with it. We do this through our conscious thoughts, feelings and beliefs.

As suggested in my book Nothing Happens by Chance, what philosophers call reality, psychiatrists call mind, religionists call God and scientists call energy, is all the same thing – these are just different names for that ever-present, invisible universal stuff that surrounds us. It’s in this sense that we can see that the words ‘reality’, ‘mind’ and ‘God’ are simply metaphors for ‘life’ or ‘universal energy’.

Thoughts are things

It’s been proven in so many ways that our thoughts somehow bring about an equivalent manifestation in our lives. For example, if we get out of bed in the morning feeling ‘down’ we’re likely to attract things we don’t want in the hours ahead. Conversely, if we bounce out of bed feeling happy and looking forward to the day just like a child on Christmas morning, we’ll experience an abundance of things to be happy about.

Every belief and thing we think about with feeling will manifest in our lives through the Law of Life. And whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re using this Law all the time. Once we know that we can use the Law to change our lives for the better.

This universal law, the Law of Life, is like a mirror which is constantly reflecting back to us what we believe to be true. It’s not necessarily the words we say or the things we do that count but the feelings or beliefs that we have inside of us. It’s this internal conviction that sets up a causal vibration that manifests itself in our lives.

Remember that this Law works like all other universal laws. It works the same way for everyone, all the time, without exception!

Laws, or principles if you prefer that word, are immutable – they’re binding; they can’t be changed. We can’t imagine gravity saying, I’ll take a holiday in Europe today! That would mean Europeans would be floating around like space-walkers while the rest of the world was anchored on mother earth! Impossible!

If we add up some figures and make a mistake it’s not the law of mathematics that’s at fault, it’s our adding up. If we know we’re using the law in the wrong way we can check ourselves and reapply it. If on the other hand we don’t know how the Law of Life works we’re likely to experience problem after problem, unaware that we’re using the Law in the wrong way.

In terms of quantum mechanics everything is the wave and nothing else exists unless we see it. So if we ‘see’ negativity that will be our experience, just as when we ‘see’ things positively, that is what our experience will be.

More about principles

Principles don’t care who uses them or how they’re used. The law of electricity can be used to heat a home or to electrocute someone. A matchstick can be used to light a fire to keep us warm or it can be used to burn a house down. Laws have no volition and that means that they’re entirely predictable!

Consider the simple analogy of a new car coming off the assembly line at a car factory. It’s in perfect condition; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the way it operates but, and here’s the big ‘but’, it performs according to the person in the driver’s seat. The performance and maintenance of that car are directly dependent on the ability of the driver.

If someone takes this brand-new car out for a spin and has an accident it isn’t the car’s fault but that of the driver (or perhaps another driver). The analogy of course is that the car is the law – it’s perfect. But it’s the individual use of the car (or the law) that may not be so perfect.

This leads to one inescapable conclusion. If the Law of Life is always in operation and has no volition of its own, it means we’re always using it and we’re always creating the results in our lives through our individual choices.

That might hurt because whether we like it or not it means we’re always having thrown back at us what we’ve put out through our beliefs and choices. In other words nothing happens by chance. But once we accept that’s how the Law of Life works we can use it to create our desires and to change our lives.

Writers and speakers often use the analogy of planting a seed. It’s a good comparison because it so clearly captures how this process works. Before we plant a garden there’s usually a lot of prepatory work that has to be done. The area needs to be cleaned up and that usually means pulling out weeds and old roots and getting rid of any stones or anything else that might act as a barrier to the growth of whatever we’re planting. Then the next step is to fertilise the soil so that the seeds or bulbs or whatever we’re planting get the right kind of nutrients.

But it doesn’t end there. We need to water the garden so that our plants receive moisture and when they finally break their heads above the surface of the soil we make sure that nothing strangles them as they grow. This includes not only keeping weeds away but also stray predators, or even our own pets that might be tempted to chew on the new vegetation.

Looking at this analogy and by applying it to our lives we see that for the Law to produce what we want we must clear our mind of old or negative thoughts and actions including fears, frustrations and any unforgiveness. We’ll discuss this in depth in the next chapter.

The fertilising and watering of the garden are symbolic of the steps we take to ensure that our thinking stays on track and here we include affirmations, positive thinking and the like.

As our thoughts begin to materialise we don’t cut them down by saying, Oh this is too good to be true, like the person who won £500 one week and kept saying, I don’t believe it; I never win, only to lose it all the next week.

Summing up the Law of Life

To sum up the Law of Life, what we think, feel and believe goes into a creative soil which quantum mechanics calls universal energy and metaphysics calls our subconscious. This creative energy somehow manifests our beliefs.

That’s it! Nothing else!

That’s all we need to know.

The rest is using the Law in the right way.

We get rid of any blocks such as fear, anger or unforgiveness and let universal energy flow unimpeded through us. We live affirmatively.

Beliefs – hidden or otherwise

Now before you get excited or upset about this let me say it’s all good because when we’re experiencing something we don’t want we know that it’s our beliefs that have somehow attracted this thing or experience. This then gives us something to work on: what we need do is to change our beliefs. We need to look at what we do want not at what we don’t want!

Of course the hard part is keeping our attention on what we do want. We’ll talk about habitual thinking shortly. Right now, though, let’s go back to what I just said about changing our beliefs. How do we know which ones to change?

That’s the easy part. If something is happening in our lives that we don’t want and we truly want to do something about it, then we look at the beliefs that might be causing the unwanted condition.

For example, if we’re having a financial challenge we know there’s a hidden belief about lack that needs to be changed. None of us deliberately sets ourselves up to be poverty-stricken; that’s why it’s ‘a hidden or unconscious belief’.

But that hidden belief is obviously somehow associated with thoughts or fears of lack. In this case, ask yourself questions such as, How do we get such beliefs?, Where did they come from?

Perhaps it was having a parent say something like, You’ll never amount to anything, or maybe as children we heard an adult say that money was evil or wrong. Whatever it was it lodged in our subconscious like a weed that needs to be pulled out by its roots.

An armchair exercise

To help answer such questions there’s a simple exercise that can be done in the quiet and privacy of your own space. Read the following three points through once and then close your eyes, relax and just allow information to flow to you.

Think back to the first seven years of your life. Think of your parents, teachers, church or anyone else who was involved in those early years of your development. As you do this, what do you hear or remember? Was it something like, You’re wonderful; you’re going to go far in life? Or was it more along the lines of, You’ll never amount to any good?

Spend a few minutes recalling the voices of the first seven years of your life and when you’re ready, open your eyes and make notes to yourself about what you remembered during those few quiet moments.

When you’ve finished writing, read what you’ve written. If there’s anything negative (e.g. You’ll never have money), can you see how this comment perhaps led to a fear or hidden belief in lack, or unworthiness, or in not deserving to be happy, loved or rich?

‘Change your thoughts to change your life’ is a great message that many of us have heard time and again. Unfortunately it is not just simply a matter of changing our thoughts but a matter of changing our beliefs. If we believe we are going to be unhealthy we will be. If we believe we only attract losers into our lives, we will. If we believe we’ll never have a fulfilling job, we won’t. If we believe we’ll never have enough money, we won’t.

So knowing that our thoughts have an energy which creates according to the intensity behind those thoughts, we need to think in terms of what we do want. Changing our thinking, and keeping it changed, changes everything in our lives.

The creative process

Up to this point we’ve been considering the Law of Life (the Law of Attraction) and we’re beginning to see how our lives and the things