When you are evolved enough as a soul that you can see your Oneness with Sarah Palin, then, by George, you’ve got it!  An initial level of this awareness is when you can see that you may have influenced Sarah to be who she is today.  This is the law of karma in play.  Do you know any of your past lives?  Do you know how you have shaped world history through the ages?  In a past incarnation, who knows what you were up to and how this shaped the thought and belief patterns of the soul who is now Sarah Palin.  Maybe you were one of the American Revolutionaries and you were at the Boston Tea Party.  Sarah Palin’s soul saw what you did… angry, violent action against the British.  Now she is throwing her own Tea Party.  See the possibility here?  Have we ever considered that maybe we could have worked with the rising British Industrial Revolutionaries on mutually beneficial terms of commerce to create our own independent country?  I was one of those British industrialists in that lifetime and we were friends with Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, it could have happened.   Instead we went to war and influenced how many other souls who were around at the time and who are now in positions of cultural leadership.  So before you throw stones at Sarah Palin, take a double take on who you might have been and what you might have been doing in previous lives that may have influenced her.

A subsequent and even higher level of awareness is next to take ownership of where you are now in your soul evolution and see how you are affecting Sarah Palin today by the energy you are sending her in your thoughts, words and actions.  If you are doing the good/bad, right/wrong game with her, then you are living in duality.  You can transcend the duality and go to Oneness by being humbled by the idea that you may have influenced her from a past life.  Then once there, your heart can open to how you are acting now.  If you are labeling, name calling, making jokes about Sarah Palin, that energy is released into the world and affects her and polarizes the situation even more.  If you can take responsibility for living in Oneness, you can provide a new example for her to follow, a powerful new model of Oneness and connection with all of life.   You don’t have to vote for her, you don’t have to accept her ideology, but see if you can love her as part of yourself and send good intentions for her own soul evolution.

When we can move past the duality and really live like we believe we are One being, we can then have conversations, exchanges and political discourses that are mutually beneficial for all.  We don’t need to reinforce the dualistic Boston Tea Party, we need to initiate a new and improved Arthurian Round Table where all are equal and all serve our E Pluribus Unum.

Dr. Dean Radin and his assistant, Leena Michel, are setting up a study on the effects of intention on light.  It is already known that the observer effect changes how light operates as either a wave or a particle.  Dean wants to measure the brain activity of the observer to see how it is different when it is influencing or not influencing the light in a little black box.  This is all done in an electro-magnetically sealed room called a Faraday cage.

Leena set me up with a headset that had contacts on it to measure my brain activity.  Some upbeat, devotional music was played into the headphones and I was told alternately to either send intention to the light in the box or to relax and not send.  The more I was able to affect the light, the louder the music would get.

I closed my eyes and began the session in the relaxed state thinking about the beach where I spent the weekend.   I was then told to send intention to the light and the music dropped so low that I could barely hear it.  I tried another mental image on the next round and the same thing happened…quiet music.  I then started thinking of my daughter and when I went back into the intentional state I noticed the music got a little louder.   I then started thinking of the thing I love most, watching my daughter dance (she’s been studying for 9 years), and what do you know but the music got even louder still.  I drifted to seeing her at her recital this past June, dancing a really beautiful and motivational performance the class had worked really hard on.  I burst at the seams with immense love and pride for her at the recital as I watched her experiencing her bliss of dancing.  It was like bliss²….my bliss was seeing her in her bliss and it was a vibrantly happy, almost heart-wrenching and powerful love feeling that radiated out of me.   I could feel my heart get bigger with the bigness of the emotion I felt.   In the lab, I wasn’t thinking about being at the recital, I was actually re-living the feelings I had at the recital and the music got louder and louder!  My love was affecting the light!

I started thinking about how cool that was that I was able to affect the light in that way, and you know what happened?  The music dropped way down again.  “What the heck?” I thought.  “I’m thinking about how much I love my daughter and her dancing, why is the music getting softer?”

But then it dawned on me, “Maybe it’s because now I am THINKING ABOUT loving her, not FEELING the FEELING of loving of her like I was before.”  So then I stopped thinking and just let myself be in the love again, and you know what happened then?  The music got louder again!

I’ve been told before that I think too much.  I never really understood what the heck that meant.  I need to think to do functional things like do my taxes and write this blog entry.  I am an intelligent, well-educated person and I like using my mind to go into crazy cosmic thoughts and mind-bending revelations.  But to experience first-hand how thinking blocked the mind-blowing power of love helped me to finally understand that when it comes to love, I need to stop thinking and just start doing… I am a conduit for love and it is ok for me to FEEL it.

I felt so much love and so much freedom to love while sitting there in the Faraday cage, with the brainwave sensor on my headset and the devotional music playing, that two soft, gentle tears spilled slowly over the crest of my eyelashes and rolled tenderly down my face.  I was astounded at the implications of what I was experiencing.

I read something once by Jean Houston where she talked about how the secret of the true reality of the universe is in the light.  Waves, particles, holograms, electro-magnetism… I don’t know how those work, I’m not a scientist.  But I do know that when I was radiating love, I affected the light.

I’m pretty sure that it’s not going to be our thoughts that save us.  It is going to be the love we feel that evolves our humanity.  Maybe that’s why we incarnate and why other dimensions depend on us here in the 3^rd dimension.  It is we who are tasked with bringing the love into manifest form and affecting the light.

Shine your love.  Shine the light.  Change the world.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Lisa is the Bookings and Contracts Manager at the EarthRise Retreat Center at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (www.noetic.org), which conducts and sponsors leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness.

So I woke up that Sunday morning knowing I had a deadline and a small window of opportunity.  I started the day already stressed.  Then as my daughter was drying her hair, she told me for the first time that she had to do a cooking project for Foods class, due the next day.  She had to cook a dish and do a poster, and this was not on my to-do list.  I had been holding it all together until the school project maxed me out and tipped me over the edge.

My mind raced with everything I had to get done. It all started falling in on me as I tried harder and harder to figure it all out, I’d have to call and get more time at the old house, we had to get a recipe somehow, go to the store, find somewhere to cook (we were just renting a room at that time and didn’t have all our cooking supplies), I still had to do grocery shopping for the week and then get to the old house to pack what I could in the remaining time I had left and keep my eye on the clock still tick-tick-ticking away at the deadline of when I had to have everything out. Whew…

I was emotionally exhausted from the separation and physically exhausted from moving recently and working all week.  It was a perfect storm of too many things to handle and I froze, on the verge of tears.

My roommate, Deborah Shemesh (a yoga teacher for 30 years and a Chopra Center certified instructor) overheard the need for a recipe and brought us one of her cookbooks.  She came into our room and took one look at me and asked if I was ok.  In that moment I didn’t have the ability to lie and say “I’m ok, it’s fine, I’ll handle it.”  I was so caught in the stress of the moment, totally at my wits end and all I had room for was to be totally authentic and say, “No, I am not ok”…and I began to cry.

Deborah came over and hugged me, not just any old hug, but a full-on, I’ve-got-you-if-you-fall, firm holding, full body kind of hug.  I felt so secure and so held as I cried and cried and cried, deep sobbing cries of exhaustion, overwhelm, tension, you name it.  She kept saying “This is good, keep it coming” and I kept on going, getting it all out.  When I finally got to the end and was trying to catch my breath with that sort of gasping wavering thing that happens at the end of a big cry, Deborah said “Ok, now let’s breathe.” Deeeeep in breath.  Then, still holding on to me, she touched the base of my spine and said “Now breathe all the way down to here,” so then again deeeeep in breath, down to the based of my spine.  No sooner did the breath get all the way down there, but something strange happened.  I started laughing!  I mean really laughing with joy and amazement.  I was laughing as hard as I had been crying!  I felt so happy and relieved!  I was so spent that the only thing left was my pure essential self and I found joy there.

After I was done laughing and had dropped the stress I said with perfect knowing, ”Ok, the most important thing today is the school assignment, let’s focus on that and forget the packing.”  So we went to the store for supplies and then to another friend who helped us find a recipe online and let my daughter use her kitchen.  I was able to prioritize what was important and get realistic on what I could really do with my day… and I let go of the rest.  I think I was even able to take a nap that day.

The interesting thing was when I let go, other things came in to support me….the other friend who helped us get a recipe and helped my daughter cook in her kitchen…my out-of-state parents called and changed some plans to come help me move my stuff by the deadline.  I realized I wasn’t alone, I didn’t have to do everything all by myself unless I closed myself to those opportunities.

I told Deborah a few days later that the crying and letting go was like turning a corner for me, life had become a little easier and lighter and brighter since then.  She said that was interesting because she had asked about it with Dr. David Simon of the Chopra Center on a conference call for her class and he said what had happened was that I had bumped into my own soul.  I guess all the stress cracked me open and all the crying washed me clean so next thing I knew, there was my real self.

So, people usually say “I laughed until I cried” but if you are feeling overwhelmed, sad, tense or in a hard place, try letting loose and get the cry out to make room for the laughing.  Joy is there at the bottom of the despair waiting for you to find it.

Part 1 was the story of the first time synchronicity led me to a job at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) (www.noetic.org). Today’s part 2 story is about how I found my current job at IONS at the retreat center.

I had been in a position for a little while at IONS that was not right for me.  I loved the organization of course, but the particular job I was in was so wrong for me that I would come home at night mentally exhausted and upset and “off kilter.”  I complained and was very unhappy.  One night I came home from work and went right under the covers in bed and didn’t even eat dinner because I was just so unhappy about where I was.  I didn’t want to have to leave IONS, but I was so miserable.  I was caught in the middle and frustrated and irritated.

Then one night I half woke up around 2:00AM.  This was very unusual for me, I usually sleep straight through the night, as soon as my head hits the pillow I am out until the alarm goes off.  So this struck me as odd that I would awaken.  But I was aware that I wasn’t fully awake.  I was in that dreamy space between waking and sleeping.

I said to myself,  “Hey, I think I am in the field of pure potentiality that Deepak Chopra talks about.  Cool.  He says we can manifest things into physicality from this place.  Very cool.”

So I gave it a try.  I put it out there through my soul conscious thought process that there was to be a new job for me.  I didn’t complain or whine about the old one, I stayed positive and laid out what I needed….it had to be fulfilling and aligned with my spiritual mission to help people shift their consciousness about life; it had to allow me to bring my full self to it; and it had to make at least the same amount of money I was making now.  I said it could be at IONS or not at IONS and I released the outcome and trusted that the right thing would happen.

And then to cap it all off I said thank you.  Thank you for the job I know is coming, that already exists there in the future that I am just catching up to by living through time to get there.  Thank you and I will follow the signs to get me there.

Hours later I re-awoke, got ready for the day and went into the office.  A co-worker stopped by that morning and as we were talking she said out-of-the-blue “Did you know that Cathy is looking for someone to work in the retreat center?  She has been interviewing, but can’t find the right person.”

I didn’t even know she was hiring!

Wow, that was fast.

So of course, I got right up to go see Cathy, knowing that intention was once again manifesting.  I walked into her office and said “I hear you are hiring, I would love to work with you.”  And she replied, “I would love to work with you, too!”

Then she asked, “Would you like to see a job description?”

And I said, “I don’t think I need to!”

I told her the story and we were amazed and had a good chuckle about how the universe works.  I’ve been working in that area ever since and we continue to use synchronicity and universal flow as part of our daily operations.

You can check out the events happening at our retreat center at http://www.noetic.org/events.cfm.  You never know what kind of synchronicity might happen there!

The first time happened when I was living in Chicago and my daughter’s father had moved to San Francisco for a job opportunity.  It was difficult for them to be apart and he kept saying I should come to California, that I would love there.  At the same time, my own internal guidance system was telling me that I needed to be in California for some other reason, too.  I sensed that being there had something to do with my life path, that my mission to help people shift their awareness about life would somehow manifest in California.

I had no idea about the details of what would happen, but I knew I had gone as far as I could go in Chicago.  I was living timid there, selling my soul for the “security” of a corporate job, all the while knowing my true calling wasn’t about selling telecommunications equipment, it was about helping people see deeper into their own lives.  I was torn because I knew one truth about myself but was living another.

I went out for a walk one night and looked up and said, “Okay, God, you want me to be in California, I want to be in California.  I am ready to pack up and move. Just find me a job and I’ll go.”

The next day, I went into work… and got laid off.

At first I was shocked and angry.  I was a top performer, I had played the game, how could this happen to me?  But of course I was getting booted out, God had to get me on the right track.  It took me about a half hour to realize what was really going on from a higher point of view.  And about a half hour and one second to know I was moving to California!

I felt like I was flying on a high wire with an invisible net.  The layoff happened on a Wednesday.  The next Sunday, I attended a neighborhood block party, told some neighbors of my plans, and that very night a friend of one of the neighbors called to say she was interested in buying my house.  I hadn’t even listed it yet!  She came by the next Wednesday, only a week after the layoff, and made me an offer on the spot.

Ok, I was really supposed to get out of there.  I felt as if my spirit guides were some kind of cosmic SWAT team, dropping in and getting me the heck out of there, rescuing me, and setting me free to perform my life’s mission.  I had more energy to pack up everything and move to California than I did to stay put and live the same old way.  It was because I was no longer lying about myself.  I was being honest and true and living in a way my heart had been yearning for, to follow the flow of my life as I was guided.

The funny thing about being out of a job was that rather than feeling limited, I felt as if the whole world was open to me.  Now that I didn’t have an income, I saw anything that made any money as an opportunity.  Things I would have never considered before were now options to explore.  Anything was up from where I was, and I could follow the path of my heart rather than the rut of the routine. I was free to pursue my own interests, my own soul passions.

My daughter and I drove to California in my little green Honda Civic on one of those epic, once-in-a-lifetime adventures. We were wild and free, on the road to our new lives.  California, here we come!

A few years earlier, I had joined the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) as a member (www.noetic.org).  I received a brochure when they moved to the new 200-acre campus and as I looked at the photo of the rolling hills of IONS, it just popped into my head “I’m going to work there someday.”  I was also told by a psychic that I would be working for a place on top of a big hill that has to do with science and spirituality.

After we arrived to California and I realized our new home was only a half hour away from IONS, I decided to pay a visit partly to see the campus, partly to update my membership records, but really to drop off my resume and to see what would happen.

I got the job offer 2 weeks later …

That was 8 years ago and everyday as I look out my window to see those rolling hills, I smile inside and am so happy to be up on that big hill working on science and spirituality and living the life I was born to live.

Your higher-self is a powerful spiritual being outside of time and space that knows it is part of a larger reality and knows it is a part of God and thus a part of all things.  It does not see itself as separate from other beings because it knows that the source for all beings is the same essence.  Self confidence is not an issue for this level of you because once you know you are part of God what more do you need?

Your personality-self is the person that your higher-self is being in physical reality.  It sees you as separate from everything else and that causes fear, anxiety and uncertainty.  This is the level of you that sometimes needs self confidence to get through a life challenge or accomplish some task.

Over lifetimes of incarnations your higher-self has been many personality-selves.  In this life I am Lisa, before this I was a WWII pilot and before that I was Anne from Alabama.  When I can transcend viewing life from the point of view of Lisa and go up to the level of the Being who is being Lisa, I can then tap into the feelings of unity at the level of my higher-self and infuse Lisa with the confidence that she too, through my higher-self, is a part of God and all things.  Then the fears and anxieties fall away for Lisa because I know I am held in my higher-self.

This higher-self of you existed before you are born and will exist after you die.  It holds the secret to who you are being in this lifetime and what you are here to do and experience.  If you need help and want to boost your self confidence, who best to turn to than the higher-self of you which is connected to higher dimensions of reality and knows a lot better than your personality-self what you need and how to support you.  The personality-self gets bogged down in ego issues, fears and insecurities and needs to boost self confidence.  The higher-self is what you can tap into at any time and any place to re-shift your awareness and reconnect to the deeper essence of you that is a part of all things. Your personality-self is the one who needs the self confidence and it’s your higher-self that can give it to you.

You can try all sorts of practices to elevate your self confidence, but if you don’t make the connection to where the confidence really comes from you won’t be able to tap into the true source of your greatness and ultimately the true source of your confidence.  A shallow sense of self confidence comes through the personality-self and can take you only so far.  But abiding self confidence from really knowing you are a powerful spiritual being comes from your higher-self and is there for you anytime you need it.  So get to know your higher-self and self confidence will take care of itself.

Initially there is a flooding sense of “Hey, wait a minute, this situation was predicted to me 20 years ago, something strange is going on.”  This gets my attention.

I then start to remember the details of what I was told and am amazed all over again as the events actually begin to happen in my life.  Sometimes I’ve gotten confused then on where I am on the space-time continuum.  If I was already told how something was going to play out and it actually starts to happen, then why not just jump ahead to that then and skip all the in-between?  I’ve tried that a couple times and it has backfired because I didn’t give the unfoldment of events its due course, like if Dorothy had just parachuted in to the Emerald City without having had the experiences of the journey along the way.   I can know when I find myself on a psychic yellow brick road that I was told I will end up in the Emerald City, but I have come to realize that the path to getting there is all part of the adventure and to arrive un-evolved from the journey puts at risk the very experience I have come there to have.  This is the “Whoa, Nelly!” stage of the experience.  I get excited that something is happening, but “Whoa, Nelly!” let’s slow it down and actually live it rather than rush to the finish line.  I also need to remain open to the possibility that I might not even be going to the Emerald City anyway.  I might have been told I was going there for some other reason, to keep me guessing and keep me having to stay in the now moment along the path of my life so I can live it fully and experience it more deeply.

The time evolution of psychic predictions interests me too.  It strikes me how something that took the psychic mere minutes to tell me about can actually take years to unfold as it manifests in my life.  What was once a brief overview intellectually has so much more dimension, depth and feeling when it is being lived.  It is sort of like those little sponge figures kids play with where they start as little tiny pellets and when you add water they get bigger and bigger and expand into all sorts of shapes and figurines.  With psychically predicted events, I guess the pellet is the bud of the knowledge of the events, and then instead of water it’s time that gets added for it to unfold into experienced reality.

I am lucky to work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) (www.noetic.org) where we actually do research on psychic phenomenon, otherwise known as extended human capacities.  But we live in a time where we are basically still just proving that psychic abilities are even possible so we don’t yet get to the deeper questions.  Once we can cross the horizon to accepting these phenomena as possible we can then take the conversation deeper to the actual ramifications and meanings that these phenomena bring.  Once we feel comfortable enough to take it seriously that something is going on behind the scenes of our everyday reality, we can then use these experiences to enrich our lives and take us to new levels of awareness.

Life is happening anyway, but to have the added dimension of the peak behind the cosmic curtain gives a whole new sense of adventure and makes it a lot more fun.  It helps to take the blinders off and get out of identifying only with being in the flow of events to a higher self-identification at the place of the observer.  The observer who first heard about the events; the observer who is now living the events; and the observer who is contemplating how weird life is because you heard about the events you are now living before you lived them!

IONS Senior Scientist, Dr. Dean Radin, on how western science is
exploring and supporting the idea of the the eastern sidhis
(a yogic term for spiritual power or psychic abilities):

See more about IONS research projects on extended human capacities at: http://www.noetic.org/research/capacities.cfm

I vividly remember the call from the doctor.  From the mammogram to the biopsy, they didn’t really think it was cancer but just wanted to be sure.  So when I got the call it came as shock that rocked my world.  This wasn’t a shock like a kick in the gut or falling off the monkey bars and losing my breath; this was a full body blow against my whole auric being.  It blew my hair back. It stunned me.  It woke me up.

I now had to deal with my own mortality.  I had to deal with it in such a real way that people my age normally don’t have to face for many years.  Sure, I knew intellectually that I would someday die, and sure, I had had all these experiences about past lives, but I never really knew death the way I came to know it when I found out I had cancer.  I really got it that whether it was this case of cancer or something else, that someday I really was going to die.  I shifted from an intellectual awareness of my own mortality to to an experienced awareness, and it was really hard.

But it was also an initiation.

As I stood on the precipice looking over into the possibility that I was going to die, my whole consciousness took on a partnership with death.  I turned to my meditation practice to help get me through what I call “my the twelve most difficult days, ” my twelve days of Christmas, I guess—knowing I had a deadly disease growing inside of me but having to wait for almost two weeks to have surgery to see how far it had progressed.

What I learned in those days changed me.  I learned that in the silence of sitting still, time expands.  That in the stillness, the moments of life fill to overflowing, sometimes even to joy.  You can feel this when you allow the moments to fill from within themselves rather than trying to cram a bunch of activity into the moments from the outside.  The over-activity of our modern lives makes us think our lives are full, but really we’re only whizzing past the moments on the way to doing something else.  When you do that, you are half dead already because you are not even feeling your life.  But when you stop, when you get out of the swirl, and when you realize that your life really will someday cease, then everything becomes a miracle and you want to feel every moment.

When we go too fast and do too many things, time speeds up and before you know it, death has come.  It is going to come anyway, but it is up to us to decide if we want it to come faster or if we want to slow things down and live fuller, richer and more meaningful moments until that time.

So, here is the secret to feeling like you are living longer…slow down!

I can guarantee you that one hundred years from now, you will be dead.  It hit me that we live like we don’t even know that.  We waste time on stupid, small stuff and we totally miss the point of why we are here.  We are so afraid of dying that we ignore death, which leads us to taking life for granted and we end up cheapening it and missing the point of why we are living in the first place.  But, ironically, in the acceptance of my own death, I gained my life.  And I gained a new relationship with my body, too.  Facing my mortality freed me in a way that I was not free before.  When I finally knew that someday I was going to die, I prioritized things and valued life more.  I was given the gift of really knowing in an experiential way that we need to wake up to the shortness of life and stop taking it for granted.

Life is to be enjoyed.  When we moan and complain that it isn’t exactly how we want it to be we should remind ourselves that someday we are going to die.  Use that awareness to put some life back into your life, feel each moment fully and release into the quality of the experience you are creating for yourself.

It’s your life…make it a good one!

“You are in mortal danger.”

“Oh, No!” I thought.  “I am in mortal danger?  In what way?” I called out to my grandma, “Can you be more specific?”  But that’s all she said and she left.  I then saw my still-living and healthy mother come out of the woods, but she was all in white and in a happy care-free mood.  So I thought to myself that whatever was going on was going to be ok in the end.

Later in the dream sequence, I dreamt I was telling my dad about this crazy dream I had about my grandma and mom.  The fact that I dreamt I was telling someone about a dream I just had told me that this was a message to pay attention to, but I had no idea what she was trying to warn me about.

Some time before this dream, I had gotten a really strong feeling that I wanted to get off birth control pills.  I kept saying that I felt like every cell in my body was telling me to get off of them, like screaming at me to do it.  A few months after my dream with my grandma, in what I thought was an unrelated decision, I did go off them and found out later that year that I had a cancer that grows on estrogen.  My body was trying to tell me something…

So, I don’t know if it was really my grandma who came to warn me, or if it was my body that already knew a cancer was growing that used the imagery of my grandma to get my attention.  But either way it is pretty interesting that something out of the ordinary was going on.

Our bodies seem to have an intelligence of their own, different from our thinking mind.  But our bodies are not separate from us, we are our minds and we are our bodies and we are the listener too.  So, listen to your cells…they are you.  They are the trillions of stars that make up the universe that is you and they have wisdom to share with you, if only you will listen.

That night I had a dream that the phone rang and it was Aunt Roxy!  I said in a really relieved tone, “Oh, I am so glad you called!”  As we were talking, I noticed that I was floating about 4 or 5 feet off the ground and I saw my husband below me asleep in bed.  I floated over to the dresser and back to my side of the bed and around the room like I was idly pacing around while talking.  And none of this was scary at all.  It was all sort of matter-of-fact.  “Oh, yes I am floating and there is Joe sleeping.”  I didn’t say to myself that I was having an out-of-body experience, I just knew it and accepted it and went on.

At one point in our conversation, I remembered that she had actually died back in September and said to her “hey, wait a minute, how can I be talking to you?  You are dead.”

And just then, the connection was gone.

The next day I had the thought that perhaps the limitations to our ability to communicate with those on the other side has more to do with us blocking it due to our disbelief, rather than because it is impossible.  It was at the very moment  I stopped believing I could talk to her that the communication stopped.

So many people have had experiences of communication with people on the other side, so why do we continue our cultural belief that it is impossible? When we block our belief in the possible, we block our ability to be open to the communication.  It’s like our internal receiver is turned off so we can’t even hear them.

A past president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Willis Harman, once said, “Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in.”  Let’s open our minds wider to what is possible and we just might be rewarded with the ability to do things beyond our wildest dreams.