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Martin Lass: S.O.L.A.R.®
Beyond Materiality. Beyond Spirituality.
Toward the Complete Human Being…
Secrets of “The Secret”
Why “The Secret” is Only Half the Story
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by Martin Lass |
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The Hype
You Can Have Anything You Want Just by Visualizing It!
Want a new car? A better job? The perfect relationship? To win the lottery? To become a spiritual guru? To change the world for the better? To find permanent happiness? All this and more can be yours! All you have to do is visualize it! (Oh, and by the way, if visualizing it doesn’t work, then you’re not doing it right or there’s something wrong with you…)
So goes the hype of the latest self-help/self-actualization “masterpiece” DVD and book, “The Secret.” It claims to reveal the “secret” of success used by the most successful people in history—a “secret” never before revealed, but rather held close to the chests of these masters of manifestation. But now you can have it for the price of a DVD or book!
Proof from Quantum Physics
As “proof” of the power of visualization to make your dreams come true, “The Secret” draws upon quantum physics (among other things), claiming that quantum physics says that we can change the world around us simply by visualizing it differently—that the world is whatever we think it is.
Proof from Success Stories
As further “proof,” “The Secret” draws our attention to numerous masters of manifestation, past and present, who allegedly have applied the “secret,” wittingly or unwittingly, to create the life of their dreams.
Reality Check
Truth and Illusion
The good news about “The Secret” is that it contains some Truth. We do have the potential to create the life our innermost Heart desires. However, we must first define “innermost Heart” as opposed to the transient and lop-sided whims, wants, and needs of our Material Nature (which we discussed in previous columns and will discuss further below). And we must realize that the possibility of creating the life of our dreams—of manifesting—is a potential that needs to be unlocked and not just by reading a book and then simply visualizing whatever we want. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), it’s not this simple. We’ll talk about all this in what follows.
The bad news is that this Truth is mixed with illusions, distortions, and misrepresentations. Not only this, but some vital pieces of the manifestation equation are missing. How it happened that this distortion and omission occurred to what was a most powerful higher Idea is the subject of another discussion, although we’ll cover some of this, too, in what follows.
Let’s begin with the Truth that’s in “The Secret”…
Your Innermost Dominant Thought
Dr. John Demartini, one of the presenters shown on “The Secret” (and who was one of my teachers), says:
“Your innermost dominant thought becomes your outermost tangible reality.”
This means that whatever we find ourselves dwelling upon the most in our thoughts, emotions, and sensations (we’ll call this collection our “state of consciousness”) is what manifests in our lives and in the world around us. This applies equally to positive and negative states of consciousness. For example, if we dwell in constant fear of a certain event or circumstance happening, as sure as rain, this event or circumstance is going to manifest in some (recognized or unrecognized) form or other.
Moreover, this applies to both conscious states and unconscious states. In other words, unconscious beliefs, perceptions, stances, judgments, and so forth can and do manifest if they are among our innermost dominant repressed and hidden states, as surely as they would if they were among our expressed and visible states.
All this happens automatically, for the most part. For example, say we have a voracious appetite for sugary desserts, but it’s affecting our health and weight. We wish to change this situation, so we take “The Secret” to heart and make a resolution to stop eating so much sugar, visualizing this new way of life whenever we remember to. Maybe we find ourselves reducing our sugar intake for the first few days, but, after a week, we find ourselves back where we started, eating just as much sugar as before.
What just happened? Put simply, our conscious attempt (and I use the word “conscious” with reservations) to visualize a new way of living was completely overruled by our innermost dominant unconscious “thought,” which is determined by our unhealed wounds, unresolved issues, and our lost, wayward, and rebellious personas, which, in turn, are all the fragmented pieces of ourselves—thoughts, emotions, and sensations—that make up our unconscious state of consciousness, if that makes sense. (See my archived columns for more about personas and about our expressed and repressed states of consciousness.)
If we were able to truly hold a singular vision, visualizing this to the point where it really became our innermost dominant thought, yes, it would manifest in our lives and in the world around us (providing we also followed the practical steps and made the required efforts, which we will talk about, too). But the problem is that, in our current situation—the fragmented, unaligned consciousness of our Material Nature—we cannot do this. We can imagine ourselves doing it. We can even make attempts to do it. But we cannot do this, because some parts of us want it and some parts of us don’t want it, and the latter parts will tend sabotage the process.
One Person: Many Personas
To understand why and how we tend to sabotage our own attempts to manifest things in our lives, we must understand that we are not one person, but are many personas in the one body, defined by one name. (Refer to the archived column entitled, “One Person: Many Personas.”) Until we bring together all our fragmented and conflicting impulses/personas into a more aligned and unified expression (which S.O.L.A.R.® calls Spiritual Nature), we cannot consciously and intentionally manifest anything. Whatever manifests in us, in our lives, and in the world around us manifests automatically, unconsciously, and completely out of our control.
Our lives and the world around us are perfect mirrors of our consciousness—perfect mirrors of all our issues, wounds, beliefs, conditioning, judgments, blame, biases, and so forth. This is the Truth behind “The Secret.” If we could change our consciousness—change our perception of things, actually, as we will see—we could manifest anything our innermost Heart desires. (Notice that I said “innermost Heart” again. I’ll explain further as we go.)
What Quantum Physics Actually Says
“The Secret” claims that quantum physics says that we can create whatever we like in the world just by visualizing it. It refers to the famous “two-slit experiment” (which you can learn about by Googling it online) that supposedly proves that we can change the world simply by choosing to “see” it differently in our minds.
Quantum physics does not say this. This is a misinterpretation and a misrepresentation.
What quantum physics does say, so aptly demonstrated in the aforementioned “two-slit experiment,” is that what we see of the world depends on how we choose to measure it. In other words, what we see of the world depends on how we perceive it. What we see depends on the nature and filters of our measuring apparatus—on the nature of our physical senses and central nervous systems (including the brain), which, in turn, create and maintain (for survival purposes) the filters of our beliefs, conditioning, judgments, and biases, etc.
And, initially, we do not have a choice about how we perceive the world; it’s automatic; it’s built into our bodies as Nature’s survival and evolutionary mechanisms (evolution of the species, as opposed to the evolution of consciousness).
The Illusion of Conscious Choice
Even when we think we are making a conscious choice, it’s more than likely simply another reaction, but so complex a reaction as to give the illusion of conscious choice. We even make up rationalizations and justifications after the act to assure ourselves that we have made a conscious choice and are not simply reacting. But modern neurology is now proving that most of what we regard as our free and conscious choices in life are simply reactions that happen even before we are conscious of it, and, afterward, we “make up” “stories” about how we consciously decided this and consciously did that.
Infinite Possibilities – One Outcome
What quantum physics implies through the “two-slit experiment” and through another thought experiment called “Schrodinger’s Cat” (which you can also Google online) is that the Universe consists of all possible outcomes in a kind of superposition of potentials and possibilities, and that what actually manifests is only one of an infinite number of such possibilities. Furthermore, what manifests is completely tied to the measuring device, i.e. to our perceptual mechanism complete with all its limitations, conditionings, and biases.
Put simply, our lives and the world around us perfectly mirror wherever our conscious is at any given moment, but including both apparently conscious states and unconscious states.
Given that what we regard as our complete, aligned, unified consciousness is, in Truth, for the most part, a dog’s breakfast of conflicting, expressed, repressed, visible, hidden, fragmentary, disconnected, lost, wayward, and rebellious pieces (see the archived column entitled “One Person: Many Personas”), what kind of lives would we expect to manifest? And is it any wonder that “The Secret” does not appear to work for so many people. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. First let’s talk about perception…
It’s All About Perception
Quantum physics agrees with the statement “The world is how we perceive it.” The act of measuring/looking/seeing/perceiving “collapses the wave function” and causes the superposition of all possible eventualities to manifest in one or a few manifestations. And all the other possibilities still remain as potentials—as the other hidden sides of the greater Truth, the greater Actuality, of our lives.
The world is what we think it is, not how we imagine it is. In fact, how we imagine the world to be is very, very far from reality; how we imagine the world to be is mixed with a lifetime of conditioning, misperceptions, half-truths, lop-sided judgments, and unsubstantiated beliefs, many of which were accepted at face value and with little thought or discernment as part of the legacy of parents, teachers, and the education system.
This is not to say that all of what we have collected in our consciousness during our lifetime is useless or dangerous; on the contrary, we could not live our lives without all this; it serves the survival, safety, comfort, pleasure, and satiety needs of our Material Nature. But what we must eventually realize is that this is merely the starting point for our further and future evolution of consciousness. But we generally take our collection of adult beliefs as being the final stop, the final word, on the journey of our lives.
Given that it’s all about perception and that the world is a perfect mirror of our consciousness, then, if we change our perception of the world, the world changes around us. Here is the Truth behind “The Secret.”
Changing Perceptions
The next question then becomes, Can I change my perception of the world? Is it possible? This would mean first changing my perception of myself, because my perception of the world around me is intimately tied to my perception of myself. Can I do this? If so, how?
The answer to the first question—can I do this?—is: not in your current state while you continue to hold onto certain “sacred” ideas, limiting beliefs, social conditioning, judgments, biases, and more. In order to change your perception of the world, you must first question everything that you thought you knew about yourself, your life, and the world around you. Otherwise, how will you change your perception if you are unwilling to change your perception? This may sound like a circular argument, but it is one of the paradoxes that we must confront to gain any true change of Being—any true change of consciousness. To change our perceptions, we must question our existing perceptions.
Granted, changes of perception do occur naturally, without the conscious or intentional effort to make such changes. Examples of this abound, such as the change of perception that occurs whenever we go through a major life event, such as the death of somebody close to us, a natural disaster, a war, the birth of a child, a new and powerful intimate relationship. Many things have the power to change the way we see ourselves, our lives, and the world around us.
However, these changes occur automatically, as reactions to the events and circumstances of our lives. I cannot stress enough that such changes are not yet conscious or intentional, no matter what our rationalizing brain tells us. Nature provides us with this mechanism of the evolution of consciousness, but only up to a certain point, after which we must take up our further evolution of consciousness consciously and intentionally.
To initiate true conscious and intentional change of perception, thereby making it possible to consciously and intentionally manifest our lives, we first need to expand our perception of ourselves. We need to see that we are not yet as aligned and unified in consciousness as we might otherwise think, but rather we are a collection of fragmented and disconnected impulses—Material Nature personas. Then, we need to bring together all these contradictory and fragmented pieces of ourselves into a larger, more aligned, and more unified whole, which S.O.L.A.R.® calls Spiritual Nature. (See the archived column entitled, “Human Natures.”)
Spiritual Nature is capable of manifesting the life our innermost Heart desires, and I say “innermost Heart,” because the energetic Heart is the home of Spiritual Nature.
Material Nature is not capable of manifesting anything consciously or intentionally, because it is an un-unified collection of conflicting impulses. To use a metaphor, an uncontrolled rabble of people with no unifying aim cannot accomplish anything conscious in the world, but a group of people with a common cause and a degree of collective self-awareness can move mountains.
When consciousness is more aligned and unified, we find ourselves acting differently. As a result, our effect upon our lives and upon the world around us also changes. In this way, the world mirrors our conscious. We do not actually “create” anything in the world, but merely change our perceptions of the world, and the world “follows.”
Successes and Failures of “The Secret”?
So, people ask me, what about the people who have used the “secret” successfully? Doesn’t this prove the whole thing? And what about those who tried it but failed? What were they not doing right? Or what was wrong with them?
I propose that there is no such thing as either failure or success if we are talking about our normal Material Nature states of consciousness, as described above. Things simply happen or they don’t happen, as mirrors of our consciousness.
How many people in the world visualize winning the lottery every week? We would have to say millions, wouldn’t we? If we didn’t have some kind of vision of winning, we would never enter in the first place.
Now, balance this question with another: Why isn’t everybody who is visualizing and entering the lottery winning? Clearly not everybody wins the lottery.
Advocates of “The Secret” might say it’s because the losers didn’t visualize it well enough, didn’t believe it enough, didn’t feel worthy of winning it, or some other “reason.” And those who did win it “obviously” had more power in their visualization, were able to believe it more completely, and felt more worthy of winning it.
I’d like to say that all this is just a bunch of crap, but I’ll be polite and more scientific (lol) and call it what it is: confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a concept that comes from psychology.
Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is when we expect a certain result based on certain pre-existing beliefs and, when we get the desired result, we say, “Yes! I told you so! I knew it!” and/or “I made it happen by doing such and such!” (by psychic power, incantation, affirmation, visualization, witchcraft, [insert your favorite power here] and other such things). But when we expect a certain result, and it doesn’t happen, we pass it off with all manner of excuses, rationalizations, and justifications, or we simply ignore it (or, more likely, simply fail to notice it), and then we go on our merry way, continuing to believe in our lop-sided expectations.
An example of this is when people try to get others to turn around by staring at the back of their heads. When it “works,” it “confirms” their belief. When it doesn’t “work,” they make excuses, but continue to believe that it works.
The sad thing about this when it comes to “The Secret” is that it makes anybody who “fails” feel as though there is something wrong with them. There is nothing “wrong” with them, though, just like there is nothing “right” with those for whom it appears to work. It simply happens or it doesn’t happen, automatically and unconsciously, mirroring all our innermost dominant states of consciousness—consciously and unconsciously.
The fact of the matter is that what we are aiming for, when coming from Material Nature and not from Spiritual Nature, is usually a one-sided illusion; for example, happiness without sadness, gain without pain, positives without negatives, and so forth. We are trying to “beat the house,” so to speak, not realizing that the outcome of the real “game” of life can only ever be completely balanced, i.e. a complete balance of pain and pleasure, positives and negatives, gains and losses, etc.
Real and Imagined Successes of “The Secret”
As for the successes of “The Secret,” we must divide these into real and imagined.
Among the imagined successes are cases of confirmation bias, as described above, which are actually coincidences about which we delude ourselves after the fact.
As far as the real successes—where the “secret” has actually been applied properly—we must divide this into cases where it has happened unconsciously and cases where it has been applied consciously and intentionally with all the prescribed conditions being met (described above), not the least of which condition is a more unified, aligned, and awakened consciousness.
Unconscious cases of the successful application of the “secret” happen when a person’s course of action (course of reactions, actually) happens to align with their Divine Design. We’ll talk more about what we mean by Divine Design below.
Conscious cases of successful application happen when a person has aligned and unified their otherwise fragmented and unaligned consciousness and understands how to access the already-existing Vision of their Divine Design and allow this to manifest through them. Again, we’ll talk more about this below.
When we do not understand the preceding and we see others who apparently or actually have made the “secret” work, we naturally assume that because somebody else did it, so we should be able to do it just by knowing the “secret” and applying it as well. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be), it’s not this simple. And the misunderstanding often leads to self-deprecation, i.e. into us thinking there is something wrong with us.
The Other Half of the Story
Who Wants It?
So, let’s get into the nitty-gritty now. Let’s start with the question, “Who wants it?” What I mean by this is “What is it in me that wants whatever it wants and is willing to apply the ‘secret’ to get it?”
It might seem like an easy question, but let’s not be too quick to jump to conclusions. Our first reaction to the question might be to say, “Of course all of me wants it!” But this is an illusion; it’s a lie, because, as noted above, parts of me want it and other parts of me don’t want it. Maybe I want a new car; the parts of me (personas) that want it are expressed and visible, shouting out their desire. However, other repressed, hidden, and stifled (by my shouted desires) parts of me (more personas) realize that the new car is going to cost money every month, is going to require maintenance regularly, is going to get dirty from use, is in danger of getting damaged every time I take it out, is going to eventually get old and out of date, needs expensive fuel to run, and will incur secondary expenses like bridge tolls and parking fees. But in the elation of my expressed personas’ elevated desires to have it, I push all this into the background of my consciousness.
If we remember that whatever is foremost in our consciousness and unconsciousness is what will be manifested in our lives and in the world around us, we will see that many of our personas, expressed and repressed, are working at odds with each other. They are giving mixed messages to the Universe. So, what’s the Universe going to do? First of all, it’s going to wait until we get our heads straight!
The second thing it’s going to do is check to see if what we desire (what our personas desire) is in alignment with our greater Divine Design, i.e. with the higher aims and calling of the greater whole of ourselves as opposed to the transient whims and desires of our individual and often contradictory (to each other) personas.
Let’s put this straight and simply: Material Nature (personas) can’t manifest anything consciously, because it’s a mess of conflicting impulses. However, Spiritual Nature—our potentially aligned and unified consciousness—can manifest anything that is alignment with our Divine Design… anything that is in alignment with the Wishes of our innermost Heart.
We’ll talk more about Divine Design in a moment.
The trouble with “The Secret” is that it is being “sold” to our Material Nature—to the transient, expressed desires of but half our personas—but being presented as a higher spiritual law. And in the selling, important knowledge and requirements are being left out, like the requirement of aligned and unified consciousness working in alignment with Divine Design in order to manifest anything consciously and intentionally. Everything else that manifests is simply an automatic and mostly unconscious mirror of our fragmented Material Nature, even while we go on believing that we “succeeded” in manifesting something consciously and intentionally.
Reaction or Action?
Material Nature (personas) can only react. That’s their function. They serve survival in this way. But there is no unifying force of our consciousness in this, but rather only the unifying force of Nature’s consciousness in keeping the species alive.
Let’s call the impulses of the personas of our Material Nature—sensations, emotions, and thoughts, for the most part—small wills. Each persona is willful, wants its own way, doesn’t care about the larger picture, and will oppose any other persona that tries to stand in its way. Moreover, as discussed in previous columns, our personas are constantly bumping each other out of the driver’s seat of our supposedly waking consciousness, each one claiming to be “the one and only” for the moment it holds the steering wheel.
Let’s call the conscious force of our aligned and unified Spiritual Nature Will, with a capital “W.” This greater Will is in alignment with our Divine Design, with Spirit, with the Universe’s Plan for our lives. When we access this higher Will, human will and Divine Will become One. And this is when conscious and intentional manifestation becomes possible.
Of course, this probably brings up the question of free will. If the Universe has a Plan for our lives, then doesn’t this imply that we have no choice in the matter? This is another large discussion that we don’t have space to address here, but will cover in the future. For now, though, let’s just say that our Divine Design is the thing we would most Love to do and be in our lives, so the question of having to make a choice to do something we would rather not do doesn’t even enter into the equation at the level of consciousness where real choice becomes possible. What resist embracing our Divine Design are all our small wills—all our personas and their conflicting, fragmentary, and transient impulses.
Real Will is a function of our awakened Spiritual Nature. However, we are, for the most part, very far away from this until we embark upon a conscious and intentional Quest for higher consciousness, enlightenment, healing, and wholeness.
Pump Me Up!
Let’s say we have a (Material Nature) desire for a new car. Visible, expressed parts of us want it, and hidden, repressed parts of us don’t want it. The visible parts provide our initial motivation to “go for it.” But, after a time, the hidden parts—all the parts that either oppose the idea outright or are simply not interested in it—work against our motivation, and we “lose the vision,” so to speak.
At this point, we may be able to rekindle our motivation by re-accessing those parts of us that want the new car. However, this is extremely difficult to sustain, because our consciousness is constantly changing, constantly in flux, constantly tick-tocking automatically and out of our control from one impulse to another.
At this point, we could, as many people do, invest the help of external motivators. We could go to a success seminar, for example. Or we could get a personal trainer—somebody who can try to help us keep on track. But even these methods actually do little in terms of elevating, aligning, or unifying our consciousness, but rather they simply try to push down the resistant voices within us while pumping up the desiring voices. We inevitably require repeated and regular injections of motivation and hype. Amway conventions come to mind! (I did Amway in my early years, so I speak from personal experience.)
Such external motivators may repeat catch phrases like “How bad do you want it? You gotta want it bad!” and “Do it now! Do it now! Do it now!” and “Live, breath, and eat your vision!” These are all good advice, but still do not guarantee that you will be able to hold the vision long enough or clearly enough to make that new car manifest.
In such situations—where it’s our Material Nature that has an expressed desire—we need constant pumping up to keep on track. Why? Because, as noted above, the desire comes from an unaligned, fragmented Material Nature and is more than likely not in alignment with our higher Nature’s Divine Design.
Put simply, not enough of us is interested in the desire or in putting time and effort into it to make it happen.
I tried for years to make several different Amway-type businesses work, but none of them ever did. It wasn’t through lack of knowledge. It wasn’t through lack of support. It wasn’t because the products were bad. And it wasn’t because there was no demand for the products. It was because my Heart was not in it, no matter how much effort and time I spent on it.
What my innermost Heart desired and what my Material Nature personas desired were not the same thing. My innermost Heart was tuned into my Divine Design, whereas my Material Nature was tuned into instant gratification and the illusions of pleasure without pain, riches without effort, the easy life, happiness without sadness, etc.
Divine Design
We’ve been talking about Divine Design a lot now. What is our Divine Design? Put simply, it consists of the thing(s) the greater whole of us (Spiritual Nature) would most Love to do and be in this lifetime. It goes beyond one-sided illusions of gain without pain, happiness without sadness, positives without negatives, and so forth. It consists of the thing(s) we would do and be 24/7 if we had the opportunity, despite the pain, despite whatever efforts were required, despite all opposition, despite anything.
If this is so, then why are we not all living our Divine Design? The answer to this is a little complex, so I’ll leave it to a future column, but I will say that the main reason we are all not living our Divine Design is because we are not yet awake to it. We are living in a fragmented and disconnected state of consciousness—the consciousness of Material Nature—with all its conflicting personas. Moreover, we identify with each passing persona, thinking in the moment each one occupies the driver’s seat of our waking consciousness that we are “speaking” from the whole of us. There is no singular, larger Purpose, Aim, Goal, or Vision when Material Nature rules us, even though our illusions tell us otherwise.
However, when we bring together all our fragmented and disconnected pieces into our energetic Hearts—through the process of enlightenment, healing, and wholeness—our greater Purpose, Aim, Goal, and Vision become clear. The larger Picture of our lives becomes clear. We begin to see the outlines of our Divine Design, of which all the pieces of us, our lives, and the world around us are a part.
When our Divine Design becomes clear to us and we completely embrace this, then we can manifest anything our innermost Heart desires, because our innermost Heart is naturally aligned to our Divine Design, and what it naturally desires is to manifest this Divine Design. All the rest of the Material Nature impulses, needs, and wants fall into alignment with this greater whole. Maybe having that new car is part of our Divine Design, i.e. to assist us in manifesting this Design. Or maybe it isn’t. But we will certainly know whether it is or not when we reach this point of unity and alignment.
Sorry! Effort Required!
One of the missing pieces of “The Secret,” supposing we are visualizing something that’s in alignment with our Divine Design, is that it’s not enough to simply visualize it and then sit back and wait for the Universe to create it out of thin air. This is a common illusion, particularly among some New Age circles. This illusion is another offshoot of the misinterpretation of quantum physics, which we discussed above.
Visualizing it is one half of the equation. The other half is your effort. Nothing comes free. To manifest anything requires effort, time, patience, persistence, planning, responsibility, and the willingness to endure whatever it takes, pain included—all those irksome things our teachers and parents tried to teach us!
Put simply, the Universe meets us halfway.
Living It, Breathing It
Another requirement, which the self-help and self-actualization gurus did get right, is that we must live, breath, and eat our vision, 24/7. Otherwise, the Universe isn’t going to reciprocate. If there are people out there willing to do more than us to get what they want, who do you think is going to succeed in the end? It’s not magic. It’s common sense. It’s hard work, driven by a unified Vision.
Take the singer Madonna as an example. She has, in my opinion, little vocal talent. However, what she does have is 1) an insatiable drive, 2) the willingness to do whatever it takes, and, most importantly, 3) complete alignment with her Divine Design, whether she consciously realizes this or not.
Put it this way, too: for something to manifest, it must be your innermost dominant thought, but something cannot become your innermost dominant thought unless it is in alignment with your Divine Design. Material Nature can’t get it unless it aligns with this Divine Design through Spiritual Nature.
Loving Both Sides of the Coin
The other requirement for manifesting the life your innermost Heart desires is that you must Love all sides of the equation. You must understand and embrace the pain and the pleasure, the positives and the negatives, as well as all possible outcomes.
Material Nature cannot do this, because it wants only one side of the equation. It wants gain without pain, positives without negatives, happiness without sadness, peace without conflict, etc. And it’s not willing to do the work, because it’s primary aims are survival, safety, security, comfort, pleasure, and satiety. It will not generally take itself outside its own comfort zones. It requires something else—something larger with a larger Purpose—to push it outside its own limitations and resistances.
Given this, one of the requirements of manifesting anything, presuming that it is aligned with our Divine Design, is that we must collapse all the illusions we might have around such a manifestation. We need to see both sides of the coin. We must thoroughly explore and embrace all sides of the issues—positives and negatives, benefits and drawbacks, pains and pleasures—realizing how all of these are part and parcel of the thing we wish to manifest.
Everything around us has two sides, even though we mostly only see one side at a time. There are no monopoles in Nature. Every stick has two ends. If we fail to embrace one side of what we wish to manifest, of course it is not going to manifest or, if it does, it will manifest in some unexpected and possibly undesirable way. This means that we must expand our perception—expand our understanding and view of things that we might otherwise see incompletely and/or one-sidedly.
Put simply, we need to Love all sides of anything we wish to manifest. Material Nature is not capable of this, but Spiritual Nature is.
What does it mean to “Love all sides”? It means, first of all, seeing how everything we express has a hidden opposite in us. If we wish for the pleasure of a new car, we are going to have to deal with the equal pain of the new car. If we want the benefits of a new job, a new relationship, or winning the lottery, we are going to have to deal with the equal drawbacks of these. If we are not willing to do this, or if we fail to see or acknowledge these other sides, we will unconsciously sabotage our visualization.
Loving all sides means even more than this, though, although we will not go into too much detail here as this is another larger discussion. Loving all sides means “collapsing” the illusion that anything at all can ever have more pleasure than pain, more benefits than drawbacks, more positives than negatives, etc, because, in the end, all these are only perceptions.
Unconditional Love
The greater Truth that lies between all the apparent polarities in us and around us, encompassing them all and going beyond them all, is unconditional Love. The experience of unconditional Love is the simultaneous experience of all opposites—pain and pleasure equally, positives and negatives equally, benefits and drawbacks equally, and so forth. And unconditional Love is the force that can motivate us to do whatever it takes to manifest our higher Vision.
Unconditional Love is the natural state of our Spiritual Nature. To access our Spiritual Nature, we must first bring all the fragmented, disconnected, lost, wayward, and rebellious personas of our Material Nature—which consists of our Physical, Emotional, and Mental Natures—into greater alignment and unity in our energetic Hearts. Material Nature must submit to Spiritual Nature, which, in turn, is already aligned with Spirit and with our higher Divine Design.
There are various processes and methods by which this can be done, many of which have been known since antiquity. The S.O.L.A.R.® Fusion process and the S.O.L.A.R.® Activation meditation are two that the S.O.L.A.R.® Way offers, among others.
This process is what enlightenment, healing, and wholeness are all about, and enlightenment, healing, and wholeness are what make it possible to manifest the life our innermost Heart desires. This is the real secret.
Conclusion
In summary, “The Secret” contains both Truth and illusion; and it contains misrepresentations, as well as some missing pieces.
The Truth in “The Secret” has been watered down, misrepresented, and mis-presented; in particular, it has been presented to Material Nature and its transient whims, needs, and wants when Material Nature has little way of actually consciously and intentionally manifesting anything at all, because Material Nature is a fragmented and disconnected collection of conflicting impulses, not a unified and aligned whole.
The Truth in “The Secret” is that the world manifests according to how we see it—manifests a limited range of possibilities from an infinite number of potentialities according to our limiting beliefs, conditioning, judgments, charges, illusions, and biases, etc.
The Truth is also that we can manifest the life our innermost Heart desires, beyond the whims, wants, and needs of our Material Nature, using the tool of visualization, but only through first aligning and unifying our Material Nature personas, then through alignment with our Divine Design, and finally through practical effort and persistence, meeting the Universe halfway, so to speak.
The illusion in “The Secret” is that Material Nature can create anything consciously or intentionally when, in Truth, Material Nature only reacts to internal and external influences in ways that are colored by pre-existing conditioning, limiting beliefs, judgments, blame, misperceptions, illusions, etc.
The misrepresentation in “The Secret” lies in its presentation of quantum physics, drawing conclusions from science that have nothing to do with the actual science.
The missing pieces in “The Secret” consist of 1) the requirement to meet the Universe halfway with our efforts and persistence, 2) the requirement of the more aligned and unified consciousness of Spiritual Nature rather than the fragmented and disconnected consciousness of Material Nature, and 3) the requirement that what we wish to manifest be in alignment with our higher Divine Design and not just be whims, needs, and wants of our Material Nature.
“The Secret” is an example of how a higher Idea, passed down from truly conscious beings, usually from an esoteric school situation, inevitably becomes distorted when it somehow manages to find its way into the general mass consciousness, which holographically mirrors our own fragmented and disconnected Material Nature consciousness. Such higher Ideas, when broadcast willy-nilly to the collective consciousness, tend to become watered down, misinterpreted, misrepresented, and misused, sometimes doing more damage than good.
“The Secret” also illustrates to us that there is Truth and there is illusion in all things. Discerning the difference is part of our individual and collective journeys of enlightenment, healing, and wholeness. And discerning the difference is the beginning of being able to manifest the lives our innermost Hearts would Love to live.
Truth, Light, Love, and Oneness,
Martin Lass
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Martin Lass,
The first S.O.L.A.R.® Emissary, Astrologer, Author
& Musician
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The first S.O.L.A.R.® Emissary is Martin Lass. His background includes over twenty years spent studying in two separate mystery schools, each with a direct lineage extending back into antiquity—one school coming through Egyptian traditions and the other from a hidden Central Asian tradition combined with the Sufi Way.
He is also a professional astrologer, astrological/spiritual counselor, accredited practitioner of various healing modalities, musician, composer, and published author.)
S.O.L.A.R.®
Beyond Materiality. Beyond Spirituality.
Toward the Complete Human Being…
www.solarjourney.org
info@solarjourney.org
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