Essays

Personal Confidence
Trust in your ability to operate Natural Law

Once again, we are gathered on the first Sunday of the new year. This, however, is no ordinary year. You see, by my reckoning the new millennium began Friday morning as we celebrated the beginning of the New Year. Yes, we think of it as the end of 1998, and the beginning of 1999. We say that the next twelve months between now and 2000 belong to 1999, but is it not more correct to say that the end of January is 1999 years and one month after the year 0000? When a child is born for instance, we count its age in months until its first birthday. By this counting, I am fifty-five and seven months old. In the same way, this is the first month of the zero year of the new millennium. We are in the new millennium!

However you chose to count time, this is an important occasion that brings great opportunity for personal development. For whatever reason and by whatever force of nature, the group awareness of our culture has brought us to a moment to pause and to gather our strength for a new beginning. There is much energy gathering in our reality, conjured here by our growing expectation of the millennium and by whatever intention Infinite Intelligence may have for this time. This is not a physical thing, but that of Spirit. You can choose to ignore this moment, or you can seize the opportunity by applying this energy in your pursuit of spiritual maturity. As usual, the choice is yours, but if ever there was a time for resolutions, this is it . . . providing you are prepared to accept this growth.

I have given this much thought. Not being one to make New Years resolutions, I felt it was important to understand why I might make one now, and once made, how my resolutions may be met. It is the outcome of this introspection that I would like to share with you now. You will see in the telling that I am not speaking about goal setting. This, I will leave to others. What I speak of here is your command of Natural Law. This command is expressed as personal confidence in your ability to operate the Principles of Natural Law—an ability that is made physical through your intention to manifest reality as you expect it to be.

Ariel Tomioka¹ illustrated the importance of intention in her book, On the Breath of the Gods. In it, she accounted a conversation she had with one of her guides. Ariel was in her back yard planting a spring garden when a trusted guide joined her and commented on her good work. “Yes,” Ariel responded. “I hope they grow.”

“Do not hope,” countered her guide. “Intend that they will grow.”

I say to you now, whatever you resolve, intend to have it met. If you resolve to accomplish something that does not agree with your true intent, then it will not come to pass. If you are able to focus your heart-felt intention, anything you resolve will become reality. Your task then, is to learn to understand focused intention: how it feels, and how it is manifest.

I will admit this is an abstract concept, but perhaps the following examples will help you understand. The first example is about a friend of named Jan, who has recently taken up dowsing. This is a particularly handy hobby for Jan, because she and her husband, Jesse, spend months each year camping in the forest and prospecting for gold. Jesse is an avid miner and Jan is left with hours of free time in which she practices dowsing for nuggets while he is digging holes in the ground.

When my wife, Alisa, and I first met Jan and Jesse, we were delighted to find that Jesse trusted Jan's dowsing ability so much that he would often wait for her to locate a likely place to dig before setting up his equipment. "Nope," she would say, indicating the easy place Jesse would have liked to dig, "I don't think you will find gold there. My rods tell me that this is a better place over here." Jesse found a lot of gold this way.

Being gold miners ourselves, Alisa and I naturally paid a lot of attention to how Jan worked her rods. We could see that Jesse had a strong personality and it was fascinating to witness his trust in her arcane skills, rather than stubbornly following where his experience led him. When we asked how she had earned such trust, she happily brought out the gold nuggets she had found with her rods. "This one," she said holding up an impressive piece of gold. "This one I found under a rock. No one believed me, but it was there." We asked and this is Jan's story.

One day early in her dowsing career, Jan's rods crossed over a spot that would have looked perfectly ordinary to the casual observer. Not knowing what to expect, she tentatively scratched at the dirt to see what she could find. Nothing! A friend of hers was working nearby with a metal detector, which was especially designed to find even the smallest nugget of gold. She called him over to see what he might detect. "Sure enough, there is something here," he said, as he fiddled with the dials on his fancy detector. "Just foil or tin," he confidently announced like the veteran miner he was. "Just junk, is all."

Jan considered his announcement for a moment, and then tried her rods again. They crossed. She backed away from the spot and approached it from every which direction. Each time, the rods crossed over the same patch of dirt. Jan was put off by the high tech contraption the man had examined her claim with, but she felt a surprising sense of persistence. This time, though, she was determined that there was a good reason for her rods to cross, and that reason wasn't junk. She dug deeper into the dirt.

There was a big rock buried a few inches below the surface. She dug around it for a time, discovering that it was as big as a large beech ball. Jesse was nearby and she asked for his help. Others joined in the dig, further raising the stakes for Jan's pride, should they find nothing under that big rock. They dug the rock up and pushed it out of the way. Under it, Jan found a piece of gold that gave her bragging rights for years to come.

Have you tried your hand at dowsing? Think of the confidence Jan must have had to persist as she did.

My next example is a little less dramatic, but I believe it does illustrate a similar phenomenon. While Alisa and I were turning south to begin the journey to our winter camp, we began thinking of different ways we might connect to the Internet. Now, contrary to what you might expect, this is no trivial matter for us. We winter in a RV park in which a phone call costs ten cents a minute after the first five minutes. This makes the cost of using Internet six dollars an hour, not an acceptable figure.

"We should be able to do something," I offered, not at all sure what that something might be. "We could have the local telephone company give us service that bypasses the park's phone system," I said, knowing that it had been tried by others without success. "We cold move to a park that had cheaper phone service, but that would put us in the city near that busy airport." Alisa agreed that we didn't want to change parks.

We discussed other options as well, but none seemed workable at the time.  "The best thing we can do is find a way to use the cellular phone system," I said as a final offering, knowing that such a solution would cost more than six dollars an hour. "One way or another," I continued, "we will find a way to access Internet."

Alisa was quiet. I could tell she was not so sure.

Once at the park, we explored every avenue for Internet access we could imagine. As it turned out, the park did not charge the ten cents a minute for calls between midnight and six in the morning. “Well, that is better than nothing,” we agreed and signed up for Internet service. After that, we did everything we could imagine to arrange our life around Midnight to six a.m. while we explored Internet. Let me tell you, we are not night owls!

Our computer died about two weeks after we settled in for the winter and we bought a new one. Not wanting to turn the old one into an end table or something, we took it with us on one of our trips into town, intending to sell it. "If we go back this way," Alisa said as we left our dentist’s office, "we will pass a computer store that might buy our old computer. We did and the computer store manager was interested.

"By the way," I asked the manager, "do you know an Internet provider who has dial-back access service, or some other way we can interface without paying ten scents a minute for phone service?"

"Wireless modem," the manager responded without hesitation.

"You say what?" I asked.

"You use a cellular side-band and it only costs thirty-five dollars a month for unlimited access. All you have to do is buy the modem."

We bought the modem and that was the solution I had promised Alisa weeks before. I had asked dozens of Internet providers, computer store sales people and telephone people, but no one had heard of wireless modems. Had we not crashed our computer, had we not selected that particular computer store, and had we not asked the manager, we would not have found out about the service for who knows how much time to come. It was even something of a quirk that this man knew the answer to our question. He only knew of the technology because a friend had become a distributor. Did we manifest this? I did intend to solve our access problem.

My last example is also about finding things. Alisa and I have found a really neat place to look for smoky quartz crystals. We must clime eleven or twelve hundred feet up the side of a very steep mountain to reach the best areas to find the crystals, but they are worth the trouble. Most people dig in the dirt around the base of the mountain, look for crystals laying on the ground, or bang away at hard rock outcroppings, hoping to find a pocket of crystals. Being gold miners, we dig holes, and on more than one occasion, we have picked a likely slope of rock-strewn dirt, dug into the ground and found a pocket of spectacular crystals.

In itself, finding a pocket might be considered simple good fortune. However, on closer examination I must say that the crystals are a gift to us from the mountain. You see, before we pick a place to dig, I make a point to meditate with the mountain. "I am so happy to be with you," I say to the mountain as I press myself into a place that allows me to be close with the earth. I smell the moist soil and feel the calmness of the cool rock around me. Such a wonderful sense of oneness can be found on the slope; the breeze cooling my face; a grand view of the valley displayed below. I am truly happy to be there. Then we dig and hit a pocket of crystals. Even more interesting, we have dug all around these pockets without finding more crystals. In each instance, had we first tried even a few feet over, we would have decided to look elsewhere.

Okay, what do these three stories have in common? Jan exhibited an unusual confidence in her senses. Despite all the doubt that came to her from the mundane world, she knew there was a nugget where her rods crossed. In the case of our Internet access, I knew that we would solve the problem, somehow. In the case of our finding pockets of crystals, we trusted in our ability to sense the best place to dig. The common denominator in all of these is personal confidence in understanding and operation of Natural Law. In each case, doubt was superseded by intention to succeed.

Obviously many successful people have no idea what Natural Law is. In fact, most people understand the Principles of Natural Law, more as an accumulated wisdom born of experience, than a formal system of belief. Also, I suspect that all of us come into this lifetime with a certain amount of recollection of Natural Law, making it possible for even the most unlikely people to have a strong grasp of the Principles. So how can you make sense of who has, or should have personal confidence? How can you gain in personal confidence? The answer to these questions is still being brought into the physical, but I believe the following model describing paths of learning will help.

In general, there are five paths of learning. You might say that these paths are ways we chose to learn, at one time or another, as we grow in spiritual maturity. Depending on the circumstances and our worldview, we may walk any one or combination of these paths, but we will tend to prefer one amongst the five.

The first path is that of dreams, which is followed by the Visionary. Rather than explaining all of the details of this path, let me summarize by saying that Visionaries know everything will be okay because they know that everything will operate according to God's wishes. The Visionary tends to be spontaneous and shuns any attempt to codify nature because it seems to be a violation of free spirit.

Next is the path of community followed by the Healer. Healers know everything will be okay because they know everyone will work together to make it so. Here you have a person who recognizes the connectedness of all things in nature. Family, church and community form an important extension of the Healer's worldview.

The third path is that of reason followed by the Scholar. Scholars know everything will be okay because they have studied all of the facts and know that everything will operate according to Natural Law. Scholars are dedicated researchers with a keen sense of order and balance. For them, there should be no action without careful consideration of the principles involved.

The path of action followed by the Warrior is next. This is perhaps the most exciting path for the observer, because Warriors know everything will be okay because they have confidence in their ability to make everything operate as it must. The warrior understands the relationship amongst components of reality and the principles that govern their operation. Perhaps what the warrior learns on this path is to trust that reality will operate as intended but without being managed.

There is a progression in these paths that follows our progression toward maturity. The Visionary's spontaneous trust in God is quickly tempered by the Healer's trust in the community to make things right. The Scholar begins to recognize the operation of Natural Law in nature, and eventually, learns to apply those Principles as the Warrior. These paths suggest rather definite views of reality, but if you think about it, I believe you will see that, while seekers may try all of these paths, they are drawn to focus on but one way.

With their growing spiritual maturity, seekers will be drawn to the fifth path, which I think of as the Middle Way. The seeker treads this path as the Mentor who understands all four paths and is able to move attention to any one, depending on circumstance and need. As you might expect, Mentors knows everything will be okay because they understand the operation of Natural Law and understand how to live in accord with the Principles set forth by Infinite Intelligence.

So what do these paths have to do with personal confidence? I present the paths model to point out that we do not all relate to our environment in the same way. Clearly, the ideal way--and our objective--is to follow the Path of Dreams as Mentors. But few of us have achieved such an exalted level of spiritual maturity. I for one, expect that I spend most of my time as a Warrior, sometimes as a Scholar, but hardly ever as a Healer or a Visionary. But I have my moments, as does Alisa. Individually, and sometimes together, we manifested reality as if we were Mentors orchestrating the operation of Natural Law to fill our need. We did this with the wireless modem, and we did this on several occasions with the crystals.

I would rather not venture a guess as to which path Jan might be following, but it is clear that she has an inordinate trust that things will be as they should. Even without being able to name more than one or two Principles, she trusted the operation of Natural Law. Most important, she is able to operate these Principles as an expression of her intention. How else could she have persisted in the face of so much evidence against her dowsing rods?

So let me see if I can put this together for you. In each of these examples, intention was followed with an expectation based on worldview. Worldview is everything. The nature of your worldview is largely shaped by your way of understanding Natural Law—your path of learning. Recognize that there are different ways of learning. You probably prefer to learn in a different way than do I or do other people in your family. Next, recognize that you have the ability to seek the center path as a Mentor. But be careful here. None of us are going to live continuously as a Mentor until we have come to understand the other ways of learning. So please know that whatever path you are on, it is right for you at this time. Experience in each path is necessary for you to become a mentor. However, when you do stand as the Mentor, even for a moment, you will see that personal confidence comes from trusting in the operation of Natural Law as well as understanding why and how you relate to that operation.

A Mentor knows and understands that it is necessary to visualize what is required with the intention to make it so. The Mentor's vision agrees with the Principles of Natural Law. The Mentor's intention to create reality draws energy to the vision and Spirit to operate Natural Law in the Mentor's behalf. The Mentor's personal confidence that this creation will occur is expressed as a willingness to accept whatever may manifest as a solution to the vision. Most of all, the Mentor's Path of Dreams is the middle way which beckons you onward into new experiences.

People are able to fulfill their resolutions because they have confidence in their ability to operate within the Principles of Natural Law, and because they are able to focus their intention. What I wish to say to you now, is that a third attribute necessary in resolution fulfillment is sufficient energy to manifest the necessary changes in reality. It is my sense that this energy comes to us in great abundance as we enter the new millennium. That time is now. What an exciting time to be a physical being.

[1] S1   Ariel Tomioka, On the Breath of the Gods, Helios House, 1988

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