Today I want to show a few excerpts from my book "Turn the World On Its Head. This book can be bought in either print or download format from www.lulu.com.
http://www.lulu.com/content/1092140
The idea for this book was the result of something called "Divine Discontent." The idea just worried at me till I sat down at the keyboard, and the whole thing just flowed out in a way that I couldn't explain or control fully.
The idea is this: Do we believe that we are spiritual in nature? If this is a world created by Spirit, and if we are spiritual beings, then are we acting like it? Are we really looking at the world as a spiritual creation? What would the world seem like to us, if we seriously determined to accept a spiritual nature as ours?
Turn the World is my attempt at going over various aspects of life and looking at them differently- and often that calls for looking at things upside down from what is considered 'normal'.
Even before the scientific age (of which I am very much a part as an Electrical Engineer), but especially in this age of science, we start with the material aspect, because that's all Science really can deal with. Therefore we define human beings as bodies with spirits attached. Furthermore, we merge the concept of spirits and souls, but that's a subject for another time.
The New Thought concept is that Spirit is One - it is not fragmented, but it is the infinite field of Mind which existed before the Universe, and which cannot be confined. It can be INDIVIDUALIZED, which means that a part of it is associated with each one of us - we each use the Universal Mind to create our individuality.
We are therefore not bodies with spirits, but we are Spirit in body. Spirit has individualized Itself as us, and our body has grown according to physical laws, as a vehicle for Spirit in this experience.
Turn the World describes how we connect with the physical world as we become accustomed to it:
"We begin early to learn about the world around us. As we interact with objects within reach, we explore them with our vision, our touch, taste, until we form a sense of repeated recognition and the ability to ‘predict’ the nature of the things we perceive.
While we are doing these things, we also begin to attach ‘meanings’ to things which go beyond the things themselves. Some shapes and touches we will associate with Mother’s love, some smells are linked with Father’s strong arms. These emotion-linked associations will stay with us for life. The result is to make food more than food in our eyes, fabric more than fabric. To us they mean Love, Safety, Caring, or perhaps, sadly, Cruelty and unpleasantness. Linkages work both ways, engendering attraction or aversion.
Over time, we build up a finely detailed mental picture of our world and our place in it. Each item added to our ‘model’ is anchored there by a dab of emotional glue, happy, sad, relieved, afraid. Each item is anchored in our model by a feeling, with which it is forever associated. The feeling constitutes the caring which led us to remember that individual item. Without caring, there would be nothing to make that item stand out from the background.
As we mature, we increasingly interact with our mental model of the world, and not with the world itself. We still look at, touch or taste things in our environment, but in the act of perceiving them, we substitute the mental image we have, along with the meaning we carry, for the thing we are seeing. We taste the apple pie, but in our mind, we are thinking of the pie Mom used to make, and today’s pie is contrasted, compared and judged. Whenever we judge (as we usually do), we are replacing the external observation with an internal perception. This substitution is so commonplace, so normal to us, that we seldom realize it is happening."
This book is intended to be used as an supplementary text for 100 series Science of Mind classes. It is designed to be an easy read, it is relatively short (92 pages), and it covers the following chapters:
1) Our perceptions of the world around us
2) The ‘Real’ world explored
3) Creation and the part we play
4) Big and Small
5) Relationships
6) Harmony
7) Abundance
8) The Purpose in Life
9) Health and your body
10) Arguments for the Spirit-Centred View
11) A few words about God
Another excerpt:
"Our external stimuli from the five senses, or however many we may think there are, are rarely sensed directly; rather they serve to drive a comparison against our mental reference, followed by our judgment of the stimulus against a set of meanings, based on our lifelong context as well as the context of the moment.
The end result of the original stimulus is an experience which is purely internal, involving our response to our own judgment. This ensures that virtually all situations live up to our expectations, as they have been, neatly or otherwise, fitted into the templates of our mind. We find it hard to experience that for which we have no means of recognition.
This raises the question, “What of the Real world?” If we are not experiencing it directly, then how do we know what it is like? And how may it be unlike our way of experiencing it? It turns out that we have gained some understanding of the world in recent decades; enough to know several facts about it which our senses cannot reveal directly."
And another, on harmony and relationship:
"Our relationships are transformed when we realize that our critical thoughts of others are really a form of self-criticism. Those things that really bug us about those we meet are those things that we have suppressed within us; that which Jung called the Shadow Side of ourselves.
Our relationship to the Earth, or Nature, is healed by thinking spiritually. The idea that all things are one causes us to respect our environment and our surroundings as an extension of our own selves. The environmental movement is really a sort of spiritual enlightenment, although most of the participants don’t fully realize it.
Our very concepts of Time and Space are altered by thinking of all Life as an interplay of energy, the visible emerging shadowlike out of the invisible. Instead of defining our life by a series of physical events strung out in Time, we might better define our life in terms of an evolution of goals, feelings, and realizations. In other words, we would use the growth of our mentality as our reference point, not the growth of our body, property, or bank account."
I hope I have encouraged some readers to evaluate this little book and make use of it.
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