I AM - A Dynamic Look at How to Be, Do and Have Excellent Health, Extraordinary We

1.

THE POWER OF I AM

“I AM” are the two most powerful words on Earth because what comes after those words will determine who you will become. And they will define the life you will experience.

Have you ever thought about the power of the words “I AM”? Do you recognize the unconscious “I AM” statements you are making about yourself all the time? You should begin to look at them! You might be amazed at how many times you look in the mirror and then just look away because you believe there is nothing you can do to make yourself look better. You’re ugly. You’ll never be beautiful. Your freckles are hideous. Your nose is too big. Your hair will always be unruly. You’re too short or fat or tall or thin. All the things you tell yourself every day have an impact on the way you feel about yourself.

“But I can’t change my height or my hair or my nose!”

While all that is true, you can change the way you think about them. You can’t change your past, but you can change the way you view it. You may not be able to immediately change your circumstances, but you can change the way you think about them. You have the freedom and the immense power to decide who you are, who you’d like to become, and what you think about anything and everything. Some may call that ‘having an opinion’. But if you pursue your opinion with intensity, it will become your reality.

The truth is, you are your own biggest critic and the creator of your own life. Unfortunately, most of us are very critical of ourselves. We don’t hold on to positive beliefs because we’re constantly being bombarded by negativity. In fact, many of the beliefs you have about yourself and your world actually come from someone else.

• How did you begin to think the way you do?
• When did your world change?
• What influenced the way you think today?
• How did your emotions, heart and spirit become what
  they are?

Surely you were not born to mistrust or hate others or devalue yourself.

Let me explain.

As babies, our world–the environment we live in and experience–is decided by our parents. As small children, we’re still relatively fearless in that we have no awareness of injustice, injury, politics, invasion, privacy, or context, among other things. Our only context is the world in which we currently live, the world our parents created. This may be a happy place or a negative place, a world primarily of abuse, discipline, creativity, chaos, affluence, culture, poverty, art, music, dancing, or any number of other circumstances. It doesn’t matter. This is all we know. This is our world view. These are the imprints that are beginning to take hold in our mind.

Dr. Bruce Lipton, author of Biology of Belief1 and The Honeymoon Effect, says, “[During] the first six years of a child’s life, the conscious part of the brain is not primarily functioning. A child is observing the environment just like a television camera, recording everything. The child observes and gauges the world through the parents’ responses and uses them as a reference point.”

As we grow and have more social contact with other children, we gain more imprints. If our early life was positive, constructive and supportive, we’re able to interact in a confident way. If, up to that point, we had to constantly defend our toys from being broken by our siblings–another learned behavior–then we may find ourselves being possessive of our toys in preschool. We won’t want to share because our experience has been that sharing causes damage to our stuff, and this imprint will follow us into adulthood.

The same holds true for everything we do whether it’s in relationships, job success, family life, possessions, money, respect, love, creativity, or anything else you can think of. What you know is going to be what you expect and very likely what you’ll get.

The good news is that what you now know–or what you think you know–can change in an instant. Knowledge is as fluid as the context within which it’s viewed.

Think about this:

At one time the world was flat. You know now that it was never really flat, that’s just what people believed back in the days before someone showed them differently. Nothing has physically changed, only the context and perspective with which the planet is viewed.

If you understand how assumption and perspective can change thinking, you’ll begin to see that what you think–the thoughts you have–are all created by you. They may be influenced by the world around you and reflect what you see and hear, but your imagination and awareness of consciousness–how you change your thoughts and bend them to your will–will determine your ultimate perspective. You can think anything and assign any meaning to your thoughts and experiences, and in this way, your world becomes a conscious manifestation of your own making.

Plato’s Cave Theory

Plato had a theory that people live their lives as though they’re inside a cave, watching the shadows in front of them made by whatever was passing by the fire behind them. They were born in the cave, yet they instinctually knew there was more outside the cave. This was demonstrated by whatever was passing by the fire, those things that were not inside the cave with them but seemingly existed with a life that came from another source. But they were immobilized by their fear of what those things might be so they refused to ‘think outside the box’. In fact, they were incapable of it because the cave was all they knew.

Those are your paralyzing thoughts.

You can think of the cave as your primal instincts; survival is the first thing you would consider, but there would be no actual ‘considering’. It’s just how nature works. First we survive, then we strive for something more. Or at least that should be the plan.

But there are endless levels of mind that can take you places you could not possibly dream of if you stay within the confines of the cave of shadows. And those can be shadows of your past experiences, traumas, lost or forgotten dreams, or even something in your DNA memory handed down to you by a potentially unlimited line of ancestral energy.

The world of thinking is the only world humans know…

…yet we are afraid of the dark, of the unknown, of other people, of leaving what’s familiar, and of exploring any possibility of what’s achievable. The real tragedy, however, is that people are afraid of the light. The light shines on flaws and exposes your weaknesses, but it also illuminates the illusions that you may have been living with; the demons. There are no demons except for the ones you’ve created in your mind.

You are not in a prison; you are the prison, and that prison is your own consciousness, your thoughts and actions emanating from all your past experiences and the influences of others that you’ve allowed into your thinking.

The Prison of Your Social Conditioning

In the movie, The Matrix, a portion of mankind is living a simulated reality created by conscious reasoning machines. This virtual activity can only take place by stealing the bioelectric power of humans, with the sole purpose being to subdue mankind into passivity and suppression in order to feed itself.

If this seems familiar, it’s because social conditioning has made your life like that Matrix; you spend your days feeding your life force into the machine, giving it your energy. You dump it all into the machine of social conditioning. This is like the social conditioning created by Plato’s cave.

The mind, like the science fiction Matrix, has a tendency to use whatever it can for its own agenda, so if your emotions are fragile, for example, your mind will ‘protect’ itself by shutting down to anything that might hurt you emotionally. If you’ve been embarrassed by a failure, your mind will prevent you from engaging in anything that resembles that experience. But once again, these are all illusions.

We are constantly decorating our prisons…

…improving the masks we wear, putting up fronts and trying to survive within the parameters set up by the social conditioning Matrix. However, regardless of how you’ve been conditioned to hide yourself, to fit in, true nature does not change. You are not the mask you wear. That true nature is what you must strive to rediscover by getting rid of your existing illusions.

So how do you break free from the prison that is you?

Begin by understanding that in order to ascertain the truth, you must doubt everything because everything in the mind is an illusion. If you try to fight against the prison, the illusion becomes real, a living nightmare, and you’ll be running from the shadows forever.

Understand that by freeing your mind from all those limiting illusions manifested as thoughts, you can create any ‘illusion’ you want.

The classic American world view, for example, tells us that if we work hard and apply ourselves, we’ll get ahead. But your experience has shown you that this is only true for some. And on top of that, you don’t want to work for fifty years only to receive a three percent...