Excerpt from God Doesn't Have Bad Hair Days Chapter One Spiritual Principles Unveiled “I have to find it here, right here, bursting uncontainably through the slipshod, fucked up, dragged down dead center of one ordinary life…..” --Bob Savino Two months before I turned 35, my boyfriend of several years dumped me for a 20-something, bleached-blonde law student. To say I was devastated would be a gross understatement. Keep in mind that this was about the same time the single woman/asteroid study came out. You know the one I’m talking about? The one that publicly revealed that women over 30 have roughly the same odds of getting married as they do of being sideswiped by an asteroid. After several days of lying in bed and staring at my ceiling fan, I finally came to the conclusion that I had two choices left. I could either slit my veins in a warm bath or sign up for a month-long work-study program at Esalen, the self-improvement mecca in California. Knowing how my roommate at that time despised messes, I opted for Esalen. On the second night there, I met a handsome former surfer named Stan who convinced me to spend the evening with him listening to the Pacific Ocean crashing against the Big Sur cliffs. We finally fell asleep in one of the massage rooms at the hot springs, huddled together to stay warm. Not that it worked. April winds off the Pacific can be ferocious and even with our combined body heat, we practically froze to death. Come to think of it, it would certainly have solved my messy suicide problem. If Stan hadn’t been so cute and I hadn’t been so desperate to get over the jerk who tossed me aside like some used bag of Doritos, I probably would have excused myself and gone back to my insulated sleeping bag. But I stayed until the next morning when “the dawn’s early light” revealed that there was a space heater next to the mat where we lay the whole time. A space heater that we could have turned on and used to keep warm!! In a nutshell, that’s what this book is about. There’s a space heater or rather an energy force that’s right inside us and we haven’t bothered to turn it on. Instead, we lay here freezing, unhappy, and believing there’s nothing we can do about our sad, desperate lives. Most of us are totally oblivious to the fact that the space heater even exists. We think of life as a random crapshoot and believe we don’t have a lot of control over what happens. C’est la vie. Those of us who do know about the space heater (ie, the internal energy source that could totally heat us up, make us happy, and give us meaningful lives) don’t understand how it works. Oh sure, we’ve heard rumors that praying turns it on, that good works keeps it going, but nobody seems to know for sure. This religion tells us to tithe. That one suggests meditation. The next one convinces us to give up our earthly belongings and trek to the Himalayas. So which is it? Is God really that vague and mysterious? And why does the spiritual force only work sometimes. God at best is finicky and fickle, certainly nothing you can bank on. Or is he? What I’d like to suggest is that God—or what I’m calling spiritual energy—is 100 percent reliable. It works every time like a math principle or Newton’s 2nd Law of Physics. Two plus two always equals four. Blue and yellow mixed together always make green. Balls dropped off roofs always fall. Thoughts and consciousness always create matter. First time, every time “Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man.” --Albert Einstein When a kindergartner bails off the monkey bars, the principle of gravity works even though he has no clue what gravity is or even how to pronounce it. Likewise, spiritual principles are at work in your life whether you understand them, can pronounce them, or even want them. But here’s why it might behoove you to apply them: Take a standard 8 1/2 by 11-inch piece of paper. Drop it from shoulder level. Most likely, it fell to the ground. But if you take that same piece of paper, fold it just right, add a paper clip to the bottom, you can sail it all the way across your average Burger King. The paper still weighs the same. It’s still the same color, the same texture. But by applying the principles of velocity, force, and lift, you make what we used to be an “impossible thing” possible. Seven hundred thousand pound planes now fly through the air, not because we changed the law of gravity, but because Wilbur and Orville Wright learned higher laws that transcend it. You can transcend anything if you come to understand and apply spiritual principles. Any light bulb with a working filament and an electric current has the potential to light up a room. It doesn’t matter whether that light bulb is big or small, round or square, yellow or white. It doesn’t matter where it’s been or how it was used in the past. If a light is plugged to its source, it’s going to dispense light. Through the conscious and deliberate approach to spirituality presented in this book, you’ll learn how to stay plugged in to your source. And every day, you’ll become more and more aware of the butt-kicking, weinie roasting, no-holds-barred power of Cosmo K. Move over, Spock “We live in paradise and haven’t even noticed.” --Byron Katie One of the main tenets of the Starship Enterprise, as they glibly zipped around the cosmos, was don’t even think about interfering with an unknown planet’s evolutionary pattern. At the risk of interfering in my own planet’s evolutionary pattern, I now plan to fill you in on some important spiritual truths. And unlike Spock, I’m damned sure hoping they interfere with our evolutionary pattern, which if you ask me, could use some serious sprucing up: The first step in spiritual enlightment is to give up your powerful attachment to conventional reality. “We are all captives of a story.” --Daniel Quinn Reality ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that everything you think is real is not. As I already mentioned, physicists, for going on 100 years now, have not known what to make of the fact that Newton’s classical view of the world has absolutely no bearing on the way the world works at its core. The subatomic world so defies all reasonable, rational logic that most scientists, scared to endanger their academic credentials, have more or less ignored the fact that life is nothing like we pretend. In fact, it’s so freaky—particles popping up out of nowhere, time traveling backwards, particles reacting and communicating with each other even when separated by thousands of miles—that the only thing scientists have done with this information so far is develop technology that allows us to blow each other up, receive cell phone messages from transmitting towers oceans away, and nuke our Hungry Man TV dinners. Turns out that almost all the concepts and judgments we take for granted are actually distortions that our very creative minds made up. Very early on, say sometime around birth, our mind establishes a pattern of perception and then proceeds to filter out everything else. In other words, we only “experience” things that jive with our very limited perception. A girl from the Philippines told me that it was weeks, if not months, after she arrived in the United States before she noticed that some people here had red hair, including people she knew and dealt with on a regular basis. She said red hair was inconsistent with what she had been conditioned to see and expect. So for at least a few months, she was subjectively blind to red hair. Scientists now know that our brain receives 400 billion bits of information each second. To give you some idea of just how much information that is, consider this: it would take nearly 600,000 average size books just to print 400 billion zeroes. Needless to say, that’s a heck of a lot of reality. So what do we do? We start screening. We start narrowing down. I’ll take that bit of information over there and let’s see this one fits nicely with my ongoing soap opera about the opposite sex. When all is said and done, we’re down to 2000 measly bits of information. Go ahead and take a bow because even that’s pretty impressive. We’re talking 2000 bits of information each and every second. But here’s the problem. What we choose to take in is only one half of one millionth of a percent of what’s possible. Let’s pretend that each dot of a pen point is one bit of information. I’ve been practicing and the most dots I can reasonably make in one second is five. But let’s be generous and assume you’re a better pen dotter than me and can make 10 dots per second. Again, we’re assuming that each dot is a bit of information. To make as many dots as your brain processes in one second takes nearly three and a half minutes at your highly superior rate of 10 dots per second. But if your brain were processing all the available information (400 billion dots) it would take 821 years. Our brains continually sift through the possibilities and pick which bits of information to “see” and believe. Our of sheer laziness, the stuff we choose to perceive (and make no mistake it IS a choice) is stuff we already know, it’s stuff we decided on way back when. We see, feel, taste, touch, and smell not the real world, but a drastically condensed version of the world, a version that our brains literally concoct. The rest zooms by without recognition. John Maunsell, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine, says, “People imagine they’re seeing what’s really there, but they’re not.” Once your brain decides which bits to let in, it builds bridges between various nerve cells, interlacing nerve fibers to create neural pathways. The average human has 10 billion nerve cells, each with innumerable extensions, so different highways get built in each brain. The map of neural pathways in your brain and say Johnny Depp’s brain are as different as the maps of Wisconsin and Rhode Island. Once you get the pathways set up, you quit traveling the rest of the country. Interstate 70 in my home state of Kansas makes for a perfect metaphor. Believe it or not, Kansas, the state producers of Wizard of Oz portrayed in black and white, actually contains lots of geological landmarks. There’s a miniature Grand Canyon in the northwest corner, for example, and a huge 7-story limestone formation called Castle Rock near Quinter. But since people traveling through Kansas rarely leave I-70, nobody has a clue these geological formations exist. They’ve literally bypassed all the beautiful, worthwhile stuff and come to the erroneous conclusion that Kansas is flat and boring. But it’s not reality. Like those highway planners who put I-70 where they did because it was the flattest, quickest, and easiest route, we build our neural pathways on the flattest, quickest, easiest routes. But it doesn’t show us reality. It’s not even close (3 ½ minutes compared to 821 years) to seeing all that’s there. The roads and highways of our brains get set up pretty early. When we’re born, every possibility exists. Let’s take language, for example. Within every newborn is the ability to pronounce every sound in every single language. The potential is there for the “r” rolling of the Spanish language. It’s there for those weird German diphthongs that resemble sounds best performed in the bathroom. But very early on, our brains lay down neural pathways that mesh with the sounds we hear every day, eliminating other sounds from other languages. With the possible exception of Barbara Walters, pretty much everyone that speaks English can pronounce the following phrase: Rolling Rock really rouses Roland. But when someone from China tries to learn English, they no longer have the neural pathways to say their “r’s”, so that's why fried rice become "flied lice." Just so no one thinks I’m ethnocentric, I have to add that I’ve tried pronouncing some of those guttural German words and my German neural pathways have been shot all to hell and back. Perhaps the best example of how your mind creates its own virtual reality game is the every day, garden variety dream. When Morley Safer showed up on your door step last night asking all those embarrassing questions, it seemed pretty darn real. But once the alarm clock went off, Morley and that virtual reality game popped like the flimsy soap bubble it was. Our neural pathways establish reruns of what has gone before. Like the three-year-old who insists on watching “The Little Mermaid” over and over and over again, we cling to our warped illusions with a tenacious grip. Get your bloody hands off my illusion. Even though it makes us miserable, we prefer to place our faith in the disaster we have made. The magic we threw overboard “Most people come to know only one corner of their room, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.” --Maria Ranier Rilke Any illusionist worth his magic wand understands that the most important ingredient in his sleight of hand repertoire is diversion. A magician diverts his audience’s attention away from what he’s really doing and directs it towards something else that seems crucial, but, of course, isn’t. That’s what we’ve done. Diverted all our attention to the physical world. The uncrucial and very irrelevant physical world. That wouldn’t be a problem except that it’s not really who you are. Ninety-nine percent of who you are is spiritual. These visual bluffs have caused you to miss 99 percent of who you are. Imagine if you had a friend who put all her energy into the fingernail on her left pinky. Let’s say she paints that fingernail every day with the most beautiful of fingernail polish. She files it. She buffs it. Needless to say, she’d have a really cool left pinky fingernail. But if she totally ignores the rest of her body, suffice it to say she’s probably not taking advantage of all life has to offer. The 99 percent you’re missing is the real magic. It’s the magic that attracts the right people and the right opportunities. It’s the force that activates the immune system, the fuel that arouses hope, creativity, infinite knowledge, and endless joy. Your life, no matter how chaotic it may appear, contains order, peace, and harmony. All the storms whipping through your life have an unseen cause that’s hidden because you’ve been focusing on that left pinky. The left pinky you pay so much attention to is the realm of Murphy’s Law—you know the law that states everything that can go wrong will. The left pinky is where fulfillment seems temporary and desire remains unfulfilled. This book is about getting in touch with the other reality, a world of absolute order, perfection, spiritual light, a world where you can initiate positive, lasting change. The perfect you isn’t something you have to create. It’s already there. All you need to do is quit diverting your attention to the left pinky and focus all your attention onto the truth. (C) Picking another channel “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.” --Bob Marley I know you think you’re being “objective.” You think you’re seeing “reality.” But, in these experiment, be willing to consider the possibility that you’re being spun by your own inaccurate and starkly limited perception. Maybe this isn’t the time to mention it, but what scientists have proven is that in order to keep our stories together, we actually learn to lie to ourselves. The purpose of this book is to release you from the imprisonment of your illusions. To do that, I’m going to ask you to suspend judgment— or at least be willing to admit that another way of looking at the world might be possible. You don’t have to do it for long. All I’m asking is that for the next 21 days, the time it takes to do these experiments, you set aside the manufactured press release you believe to be reality and consider a new possibility. You don’t have to change a single one of your behaviors. All you have to do is change your mind. Is that so much to ask? A slight willingness to see things a bit differently? If you try it, find I’m blowing smoke, then, hey, feel free to resume your old thinking. What do you have to lose? Heck, you can even get your money back on the book if you don’t find convincing evidence of Cosmo K. i