A Recipe for Self-Love

 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they my rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. Genesis 1:26

   You need to be confident that there is clear, unchallenged archaeological and anthropological evidence first brought to light by British anthropologist Dr. L.S.B. Leakey and followed by African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, that the oldest fossil remains of a human being were found in sub-Saharan East Africa. Further, more recent DNA research has revealed that the first woman who lived on this planet carried the universal gene that is common to every racial grouping on earth. This woman—even geneticists call her Eve—was a Black-skinned, black-haired woman.

   In the first five verses of Genesis chapter 1, God creates the heaven and the earth, causes light to shine on the primordial darkness, separates light from darkness and gives each a name. And thus ends the first creative day. There is no biblical or scientific evidence to suggest that what is described in verses 1 through 5 happened in a 24-hour span of time. In fact, it could not have happened in 24 hours because there was no sun or moon yet created, and therefore no way to measure a 24-hour period.

   The first day could have been millions or billions of years long. But, if you want to believe that the first day was 24 hours long, then praise the Lord and pass the donuts! If you do not believe that the first day was 24 hours long, then praise the Lord and pass the donuts! What you believe about this has nothing to do with your personal expansion today.

   In all of God’s creative work from verse 1 through 25, He merely speaks “Let there be” and whatever He says comes to be. It is not until verse 26 above, that God speaks different creative words. God does not say, “Let there be humankind.” Rather, He says, “Let us make humankind.”

   In essence, the All-Originating Spirit of God is saying to you, “You were too important to me to leave to the impersonal ‘Let there be’ commands. I Personally had to make you to be like Myself—creative in and of yourself and free from antecedent limiting conditions.”

   Genesis, chapter 1, is not about humankind—it is about the character of the All-Originating Spirit of God. Only humankind is created in the image and likeness of the All-Originating Spirit of God. Thus, your identity rests in the personality, character traits, and identity of God. You cannot know who you are without understanding who the All-Originating Spirit of God is.

   The key that will open the door to your unlimited potential for personal expansion will appear when you accept the fact that you are—in your individualized, personal microcosm—precisely what the All-Originating Spirit of God is in Unindividualized, Universal Macrocosm.

How to Overcome Obstacles

  I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses.

Joshua 1:3

    You probably are familiar with the Bible story of how Joshua captured the city of Jericho. What you may not be familiar with is how embracing the spiritual principles embedded in this story will help you overcome every single obstacle that stands between you and the life you have imagined for yourself and your family.

   Before going to war against Jericho, Joshua was told by God that every place Joshua walked upon had already been given to him. So, armed with this knowledge, Joshua and his army went up to Jericho, only to find high, thick walls which looked impossible to get beyond. However, Joshua ignored what his eyes saw before him and relied on God’s promise that Jericho was already his to conquer.

   Joshua spent no time trying to figure out how he and his army were going to get inside the city. Instead, he focused on God’s promise to him and followed his intuition to march around the city. He ignored the question of how he would get past the walls. Rather, he focused his energies on his God-inspired intuition that told him to march around the city, blow trumpets on the seventh march around the walls, and then shout. By doing this, “Joshua fit de battle of Jericho and de walls came a tumblin’ down.”

   This story is a metaphor for your present psychological state. The city of Jericho represents your desire, or definite objective. The walls of Jericho symbolize the obstacles between you and the realization of your dream, your definite objective. Joshua’s feet, as they were walking on Jericho’s soil, represent your understanding that you have the ability to place yourself anywhere you desire to be by fixing your imagination in the place you wish to be. In other words, you can live now, psychologically, in the state represented by your definite objective.

   So, here is how to apply this story and its principles to your life. First, define exactly what it is that you want. Do not make this determination based on “how” you can achieve it. Just pretend that “how” is not your concern.

   Second, take your mind completely off the obstacles that separate you from your definite objective and focus solely on the objective itself. Third, close your eyes and feel that you are already in possession of your desired objective. Stay within this psychological space you have created for yourself as long as you can. When your mind drifts, bring it back to your objective and tell yourself that you have already achieved it. Feel what you would feel like when you achieve your objective and feel the personal satisfaction you would feel once your objective has been realized. When you can no longer concentrate in this way, open your eyes, and go about your ordinary business for the day.

    Take the story of Joshua and the walls of Jericho personally because the All-Originating Spirit of God has made you the same promise: “ I will give you every place where you set your foot, as I promised Moses. Joshua 1:3

Exceed Others' Expectations Regardless of Compensation

 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. Ecclesiastes 9:10

    The second success principle that you must develop in order to expand and evolve into your best self is to be willing to exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation. It is easier for you to learn from your past failures than it is to do more than you are paid to do. Accordingly, the idea that you must produce above and beyond the boundaries of requirement and payment received will not sit well with you unless you are determined to succeed.

   This is so for several reasons. When you work as an employee for someone else, you are indoctrinated into the system of selling your time for money. You expect to make the most money in the least amount of time possible. Your “time for money” mindset is not an Entrepreneurial Mindset because it misses the crucial point: entrepreneurial success—the only road to financial wealth—has nothing to do with exchanging your time for someone else’s money, but everything to do with your creation of value that will benefit others.

   Another reason why you may not want to embrace the principle that requires that you exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation is that somehow you believe that you are entitled to success just because you showed up for work this morning—late, as usual. One seeking expansion and evolution (one having an Entrepreneurial Mindset) must work longer days, months and years than one who has an employee mindset.

  A third reason you may not want to exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation is that you have not been programmed to go the extra mile, or distance yourself from those around you by the quality, quantity, and excellence of your product or service. The expanded, ever-evolving entrepreneur must strive to do the work, sell the product, or provide the service with ever-increasing skill and effectiveness. In short, only proactive, forward-looking, and resourceful people will attain the success they claim to be seeking.

   When you exceed others’ expectations regardless of compensation, you set yourself apart from most people. In fact, you place yourself in a position where you have few—if any—competitors. Having such a posture permits you to own what you do and take great pride in it. Under these circumstances, the product or service you provide others has personal meaning to you. Also, you seek to upgrade your own performance and look for ways to improve the entire process of producing whatever it is in which you are engaged. Your productive and attitudinal change in mindset is unmistakably noticeable to your clients and customers. It sets you apart because you know you are adding value to others. You are no longer selling your time for money: you are creating value above and beyond any dollar amount you receive; and that value accrues to the self-image you have of yourself in your unconscious.

   You love and appreciate yourself as a person of inestimable worth who is no longer alienated from the product or service you provide. This selfless behavior of yours, over a consistent period of time, begins to earn for you a reputation that attracts wealth to you and retains wealth for you.

Learn from Your Past Failures

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is--his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

   In order to achieve personal growth, expansion, and evolution (true success) in and through any given endeavor, you must lay the foundation of completing a sold track record of accomplishment along the way. Small progress in small things leads to greater progress in larger things. By building incremental progress into whatever you are doing now, you lay down a history and pattern of personal growth that will follow you into the future. However, it does not follow that your failures in small things will lead to your failures in larger things. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite.

   The personal success that comes to you because of your forward growth and development is not related to luck or good fortune. It is the result of a process. The process of success includes learning and practicing seven proven success principles. The first of these principles is one of the most important lessons that you must learn early in your quest to succeed in whatever area you have chosen. You will not know the success you were meant to achieve if you do not learn from your past failures.

   Part of completing a solid track record of personal growth is learning from the failures that will inevitably come to you along the road to your ultimate success. Life is so organized that progress cannot be made without facing and overcoming personal failures. Evolutionary progress always requires new learning. Thus, you cannot learn something new by doing the old thing you did yesterday. When you try something new today, you will almost always fail again and again, until you find out why the new thing you are trying today does not work. This is the reason for learning from your past failures. The old dictum is true: “Nature, unaided, fails.”

   To learn from your past failures, you must understand that part of the process of becoming successful (personally expanding and evolving) is moving through failures without being discouraged or disheartened to the point of quitting, thereby giving up on the dream you have imagined your life will become.

   To learn from your past failures is to embrace the teaching that you must be self-confident enough to take risks, but wise enough to assess the risks, consider the rewards, and then proceed with boldness. If you have done your homework properly, then when you fail you can pinpoint where you went wrong. You may have begun with the wrong assumptions, insufficient facts, or dependence on an unreliable source. Wherever you went wrong, whatever you have miscalculated in the environment, or whoever you misjudged, overvalued or undervalued will become the lesson plan you use to learn, grow and add to your store of wisdom. 

   To learn from your past failures is never to lose your boldness and self-assured status on the one hand, and always to gain humility and even more fearlessness on the other.  

On Growing in the Spirit

 Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes. Romans 10:4

   Your personal acknowledgement that the All-Originating Spirit of God lives within you, and that you have a personal relation to it, gives you a new basis of Affirmation. You are the starting point of a specifically-designed-for-you creative process that will lead you to your next level of personal growth and development.

   As enormous as this Thought is, you must remember that it is only a starting point. It transcends your previous range of ideas, and presents you with a new set of ideas at a higher level. But, just as when you graduated from high school as a senior, your next level of college put you back in freshman status, so also your growing beyond where you became a senior at one stage of your development, brings you back to the beginning of the next stage of development as a freshman.

   Because the Spirit is always the same, you may expect a repetition of the creative process within you, but at a higher level. That process will require you to engage in involution—actually becoming what you desire and staying in Unity with it regardless of what you are able to see, hear, touch, taste or smell. This is what Neville Goddard called living as if your wish were already fulfilled. At this point you should look for a repetition of the universal process from its new starting point in your mind. You should expect to see your Thoughts being externalized in concrete form.

   Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, is set before you as the  external manifestation of the Divine Ideal. The more clearly you realize the nature of the creative process on the spiritual plane, the more your objections to and unbelief about the Gospel narrative about Jesus will fade away. If you deny the Gospel narrative about Jesus as an impossibility, then you deny the power of the Spirit in yourself.  You cannot succeed at affirming a principle and denying it at the same time. If you affirm the externalizing power of the Spirit in your own life—the countless times you have created something from nothing just by your mere Thought—then you cannot logically limit the Spirit’s action by saying that under highly specialized conditions it could not produce highly specialized effects.

   If the Spirit can create at all, then you cannot logically limit the extent or method of its action. Since the basis of your own expectation of individual expansion must be premised on the limitless creative power of the Spirit, to reject the Jesus of the Gospels as an impossibility is to cut away the ground from under your own feet. It is one thing for you to say, “I do not understand why the Spirit would work in that way”—that is merely an honest statement of your present stage of knowledge. Even if you go to the length of saying, “I am not convinced that it happened the way it is written,” that is a true statement of your intellectual difficulty.

   But certainly, those you profess to rely on the Spirit to produce external results cannot say that it does not possess that power, or possesses it only in a limited degree. That position is logically destructive. What you should do is suspend judgment and follow the light as far as you can see it. Sooner or later, it will become clearer to you. When you realize how completely the Law of Your Own Being receives its completeness—its fulfillment of culmination—in Jesus as far as you know that law, then you can conceive that there are yet deeper phases of that law that you can only faintly surmise by intuition. You may have had an experience or two when just the fringe of the veil was lifted and you got a momentary glimpse of the powers and mysteries beyond your present conception. But even there, Law reigns supreme.

   Therefore, taking Jesus as your basis and starting point, you start with the Law already fulfilled, whether in those things familiar to you, or in those realms that are beyond your thought. You need have no fear of evil. Your new starting point with Jesus is the place you will quietly grow into the evolution which fulfills the Law of Your Own Being.