The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell You (15 page)

Imagine that you’ve
already
received, done, or become that which you now desire. Do not imagine
how.

T
HE
M
IRACULOUS
M
ECHANICS OF
M
ANIFESTATION

There are,
of course,
steps that virtually all physical manifestations can be seen to follow. Deliberately engaging their mechanics begins with knowing what they are. Becoming proficient enough to get consistent results requires practice. Critical to the process is knowing that you’re never alone. You have an anxious Universe and supportive principles at your beck and call—not accidentally, but by design—nonjudgmental yet leaning in your favor because this is in alignment with the intention of the entire nonneutral Universe. You are it; you are adored; you are God becoming more, here to joyfully succeed.

Your job in bringing about change is the easy part. Just two steps are required for unleashing metaphysical energies and laws, bringing about what others will likely call miracles, luck, destiny, divine intervention, coincidence, and the like. And if you simply take both steps, and keep on taking them until there are results, as long as you aren’t tripping over the nuances named in the following steps, thy kingdom or queen-dom must come. But you
have to
take these two steps even though it may
seem
that you’re all alone, nothing’s happening, and the odds are severely stacked against you.

Step 1: Define what you want in terms of the
end result
.

Mentally, in your mind, in thought, imagine that you’ve
already
received, done, or become that which you now desire. Do not imagine
how
this will happen. Do not worry about the logistics. Do not see the process; imagine it completed.

Step 2: Show up, every day, moving in the direction of your dream.

Physically, to any degree you can, do something. These are the baby steps. They
always
seem futile. You may be dreaming of champagne and caviar, yet you have to ride the bus to your interview at the mall. Do it anyway. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t sure if you’re on the right path; chances are you’re not. Do it anyway. If you have absolutely no idea of which direction to move in, move in
any
direction.

Your thoughts have an energy and a life force all their own. They move around the props, players, and circumstances of your life as if they were puppets on strings, predisposing you to life’s so-called accidents, coincidences, and serendipities. These will lead you into a world that ultimately, gradually, and seamlessly mirrors what you had been thinking about. Yet if you stay at home sitting on your couch with a vision board waiting for Oprah to call, there simply cannot be any accidents, coincidences, or serendipities. This is why you must physically act on your dreams, not to hit the home run or to do the hard part but to be within reach of life’s magic. It rarely matters precisely what you do; because you’ve done something, a world with new possibilities is drawn to you.

L
IKE
GPS N
AVIGATION

Perhaps you can see this even better with the metaphor of GPS navigation. It’s built into cars and smart-phones and works in exactly the same way as dreams come true.

Step 1: Give the device your
destination
(end result).

Because it already knows where you are, as soon as you give it your destination the GPS knows
how
to get you there! In fact, in a split second it considers
every
road and highway you could choose from. It factors in speed limits, traffic lights, yields, merges, and often construction. And amazingly, in a split second, it then knows the shortest, quickest, happiest route! But notice, it doesn’t start “talking” to you until you do Step 2.

Step 2: Put your car in gear (and roll).

If you don’t put your car in gear, the entire system is wired
to not help you!
If your car remains in Park, you’re actually telling it, “No. Not now. I’m not ready.” Even if you don’t know you’re saying that, you won’t be helped, because telling it where you want to go and then not letting it take you there is a giant contradiction. It’s the same in life when you have dreams you don’t constantly act on. In the car, once you’re in Drive, the entire system flies into action, tracking your progress, rerouting you when necessary, virtually holding your hand until you arrive. Should you choose less than optimally, perhaps distracted by singing along at the top of your lungs to Barry Manilow, you’ll eventually be put back on track with “Make a legal U-turn.” You don’t get such guidance and correction in either a parked car or a parked life.

T
HE
M
IRACLES OF
P
ROGRESS
A
RE
I
NVISIBLE

The miracles of progress are almost always invisible, but this doesn’t mean they’re not happening.

When you set out to change your life—or, to stick with our last metaphor, embark upon a GPS-guided journey, this time three hours long and to a new friend’s home that you’ve never visited before—at what point in the journey does it become obvious that every left- and right-hand turn was spot-on, perfect, miraculous?

In the final seconds!!

Can you imagine the travesty, then, of concluding at 2 hours and 55 minutes into the journey, “It’s not working for me … It works for everyone else but me … I must have invisible, limiting, self-sabotaging beliefs … I think I’ll return home and watch
The Secret
30 more days in a row”? No! It
does
work for you! It
always
works for you! Every day you get closer; every day it gets easier! Let these conclusions be your modus operandi forever more, on every journey. The moment you claim it’s not working,
it stops working
. The moment you claim it’s hard, it becomes hard. The Universe, your greater self, hears you. These become your new end results. It doesn’t judge. It just responds. You cannot tell it one day, “I’m going to be a rock star” and the next day say, “It’s not working” without these two opposing “end results” clashing and possibly canceling each other out. Yes, you’re still inclined to succeed, yet why make it harder than necessary when sometimes a simple change in perspectives and words can so powerfully work in your favor?

T
HE
N
UANCES

Wheels don’t generally roll up hills, fires don’t usually burn wet logs, and dreams have a very difficult time coming true if they’re dependent upon:

1. Specific paths (the cursed “hows”)
   
2. Specific people (the cursed “whos”)
   
3. Specific details
   

Specific Paths

Sometimes you’ll succeed,
but insisting that a specific path is
how
your dream will come true is messing with the “cursed ‘hows.’” You put the weight of the world on your shoulders, creating stress, fostering worry, and worse, limiting an otherwise unlimited Universe. A Universe that is tracking each and every one of your 60,000 unique thoughts per day, as well as those of 7 billion other co-Creators. And not only are all of these thinkers prone to change their minds and rearrange their life priorities on the fly, but all have dozens if not hundreds of other dreams, desires, and wishes that are also added into the equation of every new second in time and what it will physically contain. The Universe, therefore, needs flexibility and freedom, just as anyone would who’s negotiating an obstacle course filled with swiftly changing parameters. Yet as soon as you say, “I must make my fortune from this book I will write,” you slam the door shut on all other possible ways for making fortunes. Not that you can’t possibly have both, but as soon as you see X as the only way you can have Y, you’re skating on thin ice, with
infinitely fewer
paths for success.

Specific People

Again,
sometimes you’ll succeed,
but you simply cannot make specific people behave in specific ways unless they let you. Not your romantic partner, business partner, clients, customers, children, parents, employer, or employees. They have the built-in protection you also have—that your life, options, and power cannot be infringed upon—however to the contrary this may often seem.

This by no means prevents you from having an amazing romantic partner, business partner, clients, customers, and so on; it merely means you can’t specifically insist upon who they must be. Turn it over to
divine intelligence,
who knows all such possible matches.

As a parent or an employer, you have a responsibility to guide the behavior of those specific people who need and want your guidance. But even as you work to maximize the chances that they’ll behave as you would have chosen, there’s still no guarantee they will. Know this, and do not hang the star of your happiness upon their choices.

Specific Details

Details are a dime a dozen, and no matter what they are, no matter how sexy, fun, and compelling, they’re all unimportant. This doesn’t mean your life won’t always be filled with details or that those details that show up won’t thrill and excite you. But when you insist upon or attach to any particular details, whether part of a bigger picture or not, there will likely be stress, limitation, and perhaps bitter disappointment. First, understand that specific details are relatively unimportant to the grand scheme of your being. Second, know that if those details are too entwined with specific paths and specific people, they may similarly jeopardize the entire manifestation.

As was true of the specific hows and specific people, if you insist on specific details
sometimes you’ll succeed
. Especially if there’s a lot of what you want available, like red roses or a particular year and color of a Volkswagen Beetle—you’ll probably get them. But for a particular house on a particular hill, or a gold medal at the next Olympics, understand that when there’s only one of something and lots of people want it, many will be upset if they put off their happiness until they get it. There’s absolutely no need to give importance to items that exist in scarcity
when what you really want is more happiness, more health, more love, and more abundance, of which there’s enough for all.

Attempting to micromanage your greater successes by first stacking up or collecting details is essentially the same as messing with the “cursed ‘hows.’” Let ’em go. The brain’s too small; it wasn’t meant to do this. Yes, the details rock—definitely think of them, visualize them, love them—
just don’t insist on or attach to them.
This is not hard to do. Leave room for even better than you could have imagined. Let your end results be happiness, health, prosperity, or other ambitions that have sweeping implications for the “time of your life” without attachment to trinkets that will, all on their own, inevitably show up at the right time, in the right way.

Here’s how you can dance with the nuances, yet without attachment:

Imagine driving Bruno and yourself, in your new red BMW, with a dozen yellow roses in the backseat, on your way to LAX airport, to fly Upper Class on Virgin Atlantic to London Heathrow, on the first leg of an around-the-world trip, to celebrate the opening of your new hula-hoop factory in Mobile, Alabama. But as you go on living your life, metaphorical car in gear, showing up and taking action, don’t lock out other possibilities. Remain open. Knock on lots of doors. Start writing your book, too, go back to school, circulate your résumé, try real estate sales, join an Internet dating site, and never stop being available to life’s magic and miracles while obviously considering your strengths, likes, and preferences every step of the way.

It might not be Bruno, London, or the factory, after all. It may instead be Rocky, Rome, and your new yoga empire. The details should only get you excited about your end results, they should not
be
your end results. Attach to the big picture, your exciting new life, and surrender to all else while constantly showing up.

Resist the temptation to bite into the apple from the Garden of Eden, which was only ever a metaphor for behaving as if the illusions of time, space, and matter were more real than that which gave them rise. Don’t eat of the forbidden fruit by seeing circumstances out of context, as if the paths, people, and details must be managed to get what you want. Instead go within to their source: your imagination.

Y
OU’VE
B
EEN
M
ISLED
—
BY
Y
OUR
P
HYSICAL
S
ENSES

By now you can probably appreciate that if someone believed “life is hard and people are mean,” this would be one of their unintentional end results, Step 1. It’s not that they
want
the world to be the way they believe it is, but desire or aversion alone is not the determining factor in any manifestation. What matters is that the thoughts are thought and then, Step 2, they are acted upon.

Acting upon end results doesn’t just mean going out to try to make them happen. Sometimes your collateral behavior will tip the scales toward hastening a manifestation. If you believed life was hard and people were mean, collateral behavior might include stockpiling, locking doors, guarding your heart, and so on. And while such precautions would seem to ward off “evil,” energetically, they’d actually invite it. “As a man thinketh, so he behaveth,” increasingly ramping up the energy and a sense of expectation, and eventually those thoughts become things. With such a manifestation, you’d have cause to think and behave further along the same lines and a cycle would be born.