MKMMA Week 21 Don’t you Dare

MKMMA Week 21  Don’t you Dare Pinch me I don’t Want to Wake Up

So we’re off to the races with the new addition to my insurance agency that I told you about last week. There is so much going on that I have had to hire an assistant and the number of agents working with us has doubled. (and Yes both of them are doing great)  I insert that little humor because it usually annoys me when people put out statements like that without specifics, leaving the possibility that the “doubling” they are so proud of was really just one more person. In this case I choose to say “doubled” instead of the actual number is because I lost track after the 15^th new person came on and am not sure exactly how many there are spread out across the country.

So things in the business world are interesting, exciting, challenging and starting to be very profitable and I bet you can guess what challenge has already raised its head. MKMMA? What MKMMA? Who has time for a sit? I’ll be sitting in my car all day as I drive to Vegas to train this new team that showed up in 2 days. Then just listen to your recording and Earl Nightingale while you drive. Listen to a recording? Are you goofy? I’ll be on the phone all the way out and all the way back trying to get in touch with all these new un- trained people.

I knew that I was making excuses, but also knew that there was something going on that was almost making me glad to have an excuse to disengage. Was it the old blueprint? Frankly, I doubted it as ascribing any counter or rebellious thought to the old blueprint is just a tad disingenuous. It implies that the “new”  blueprint material is all perfect, and that there is no room for a rational person to disagree with any of it, and you know that is not how I think. Then I had an epiphany, my “new blueprint” has worked so hard at helping me dig out from under my old  BS that it is particularly sensitive to new BS. The BS that it was reacting to, in fact trying to protect me  from was good ol Frank.  Mr Haanel in his unrelenting attempts to marginalize God to nothing more than “the creative power of thought” (Intro to Lesson 20) was himself triggering my internal BS detectors and that was causing a state of dis-harmony which I interpreted as me wanting to disengage.

 

It was a odd and awkward place to be for a few days and then Nancy shared this with me from a book she is reading by C.S.Lewis

 

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automatons – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely,  voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”  Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis

 

There I realized, is the point of departure between myself and Haanel. I believe in intentional design on the part of a present and authoritative God. Haanel does too, he just desperately wants to convince himself otherwise, and there is where I wish him luck. He had so much figured out, that I find value in reading him everyday,  but he seems to have missed out on the biggest blessing the Universe has to offer. Which in my opinion is Friendship. The Creator of our Universe is a person and Frank could have had Him as a friend.  Perhaps sometime after he wrote these lessons  he met Him, it would be great fun to read that story.

MKMMA Week 20 In a Good Place

MKMMA Week 20   In a Good Place

This has been a week of astounding abundance. I was offered a chance to “check out” a business opportunity that much to my relief,  actually turned out to be a normal real world business.  I of course at first that it was yet another Amway type multi-level faux business, but the more I looked the more “real” it became. Briefly, a provision of the Affordable Care Act that was just released to the public Jan 1^st of 2014, finally came to light (after all the act is now over 20,000 pages long) and this provision gives employers a $500 incentive to offer wellness programs to their employees.  I was asked to build a team to tell all the employers in Southern California the good news, and offered a very profitable contract if I would do so.  (bloggers note: please don’t hate me if you think I just insulted your favorite network marketing business, I’m sure you would call it a very real business, and I get that. Having built several traditional  businesses over the years, and having been so successful in the MLM world that last year I won a recruiting contest for all of North America with a company, I feel that MLM’s often bring out the worst in people, and that grieves me deeply because the potential to bless is so great in that industry)

All of a sudden everything changed. (Well indulge me, make your definition of “all of a sudden” mean …”after three weeks of intensive study and research”)  The country estate my DMP expects me to have “before Christmas 2016” is now easily in sight.  The “100 agents contracted and trained before July 4^th 2017” that I talked about to my mirror for 50 minutes months ago are all ready starting to show up.  I feel as if my visualizing has suddenly taken shape before my very eyes and I am fascinated by the suddenness of its appearance, and by the complete unpredictability of the source it showed up from.

Here’s what happened. 18 months ago, I was courted by an insurance carrier for a similar purpose. “Build us a team to market our products in So Cal, and we’ll make you rich” was the pitch.  I was wined and dined and flown around the country to meet executive teams and finally decided to take the offer. A few weeks after I agreed I was asked to go out to Las Vegas to speak to a group of about 50 of this company’s agents to share about the success I had already had with Aflac (which was why they were recruiting me) and tell the group how I planned to replicate and surpass that success with the new carrier that they had all already been with, some for many years.  Not wanting to appear like an arrogant know it all, I was careful to down play my previous work and shared my vision without implying that I thought I was better at this than the agents listening to me. I merely encouraged them to think out of the box and give themselves permission to question everything that wasn’t working and embrace whatever did work, even if it came from some new guy.  Well it turns out that the man who has recruited me to this wonderful new opportunity was in that room that day, all the way from South Dakota. He says now that he liked what he heard me say and the results that came afterward, so when he was approached about taking a National Sales Director position with VIPCO Advisors, he immediately put my name on the list of people he would try to recruit, and here we are.

Oh my, oh my. My projected earnings over the next 12 months are over 1 million dollars with the stock bonuses thrown in, and all of this has been in the background in the works and I had no idea. I am blown away, delighted, overwhelmed, but most of all grateful, so very grateful.

MKMMA Week 19 Nothing to Report…Finally!

MKMMA Week 19 Nothing to report…Finally

 

So here we are finishing up week 19, and I don’t have anything to vent about. Don’t worry,  I still am fascinated by Frank H. like this weeks exercise in self delusion, 19:14: “We also know that this mind is static, mind at rest, we also know that the ability of the individual to think is his ability to act upon the Universal Mind and convert it into dynamic mind, or mind in motion.”  Please Mr Haanel,the event at the cross on Calvary which remains one of the best documented events of is day, displays just a little more than “static” mind, and the implication that unless we get to thinking the Universal Mind is just going to lay about sucking its thumb is so absurd it appears to me to be quite frantic. But for this week at least, I don’t really care what axe Frank has to grind. I have frequently written about my own frustration at not keeping up with assignments, (like posting this blog late), have shared with you my struggles to figure out why I can’t stay with the program. But this week, I’m OK with it all.

Here’s why…….I have no idea.  I just am OK, at peace, feeling like things are going in the right direction and best of all, I saw myself bringing value to people all around me this week which is my favorite thing to do.

Hey, I wonder if it’s because of all that cool weird stuff I’m learning from Frank Haanel?  (Sometimes I just crack myself up)

MKMMA Week 18 Did Your Car Fly Off the Road This Week?

MKMMA Week 18  Did Your Car Fly Off the Road This Week?

I’ve noticed that there is a situation getting out of hand these days, and I think atheists are to blame. Its all these cars randomly shooting up in the air because so many people believe that God is dead, that they have stopped asking Him to keep the law of gravity working. It’s annoying and a terrible waste of time, you’re just sitting there at a stop light and all of a sudden your car just goes shooting up into the air because God got distracted with something else, and let Gravity turn off. Of course if you and hopefully some of the other cars around you, quickly and enthusiastically entreat God to turn it back on He usually does, but it’s a lot of extra bother, and I wish the atheists would just cut it out, they have got people all distracted and careless and its messing up the morning commute something terrible around here.

OK, I’ll admit sometimes I just crack myself up, but this logic really thrills  me. I am starting to delight at the freedom and empowerment that comes with realizing that God has given all of us a tremendous gift by creating the Laws of the mind.  I’m excited to have become convinced that the law of Dual Thought is just as real and dependable as the law of Gravity. The law of Substitution is just as real as the law of Centrifugal Force. The really cool thing is, God is not offended if I don’t ask Him each day to keep them working. The practical application of this of course, is that it’s one more piece of my life that I see He has planned from the very beginning for me to have control over.

As we were driving in the car today, my wife and I were talking about how the future is looking now that I am part of the MKMMA. She said, “it sure is going to be fun to see what God has in store for us” I heard  her choice of words and could almost feel a hopelessness settle on me as I thought of more years sitting passively  by while “God” unrolled His plan. (or didn’t which of course my personal old blueprint would assure me was entirely my fault for not being good enough or religious enough or left handed enough or some such nonsense)  Almost I say, because I quickly kicked out that idea and began to contemplate the tremendous gift that Proverbs 23:7 promises, “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he” WOW,WOW and DOUBLE WOW     I get to create my own future in my own mind. But wait, that’s not the good part. The good part is that the same Universal Mind that created the law of Gravity that I find so completely dependable that I never even think to ask for reassurances regarding its function, that mind also created these laws of the mind. Therefore they must be just as dependable!!!!!  They have been working in my life before I discovered them, just as surely as Gravity was working before Newton discovered it. Now that I have discovered them though, oh my oh my the possibilities.  No more helpless confusion, no more discouraged waiting for “God” to “reveal” His will for my life. He gave me a tremendous gift of a mind that works with His resources to create whatever future I tell it to. Even more, He put that powerful mind under the watch care of absolute laws that I would eventually discover and learn to work with, so that clarity and certainty could be earned regarding just how this amazing gift was designed to be used.

I am blessed and grateful almost beyond measure, and that’s a pretty good place to be. (Please insert your own mental picture of me with a giant grin HERE)

MKMMA Week 17HJ Finding Peace at Last

MKMMA Week 17HJ     Finding Peace at Last

No I’m not dead, I’m not referring to that peace, but thank you for your concern. I’m at peace with me, well more accurately I’m at peace with my ability.

There is much for us to be soaking in during this course. Think about it, we’re reading Og Mandino who is on his own tangent, Napoleon Hill who at least agrees with Haanel, Emerson who is so deep that entire college courses are designed around him, Fox who some probably find the hardest because he is asking for such a deep change, Haanel himself or at least this paraphrase of him, and then we’re absorbing Mark, Davene and Trish’s teaching. That’s a lot, and I doubt if there are many who take this course, that actually find a way to fully integrate all of it, at least those who are new comers to this type of material.  As you know, it has been a very torturous though fortuitous challenge for me, but last week was the turning point. The speakers challenged us to let go of the old, and I decided to break the jar instead of letting go of the banana, but the end result was that I did get my hand free. The thing was, the main belief that was holding me back, was that God wasn’t willing to work directly with me to sort out my thinking. When I let go of that fear, a weight lifted off my shoulders that has let my spirit rise, my confidence surface, and my peace settle in.  Mind you, I still didn’t get every task done, but I got a lot done, and best of all…..I found great pleasure in the lessons I reviewed with Frank Haanel  YAHOO!

I’ll close by sharing what broke the “jar” for me freeing my hand and my mind. When we were asked to write out that we were giving ourselves permission, I did and used the nickname “Bob” as that was my childhood name. “Accidently” when I wrote the first B of Bob, my handwriting looked just like my father’s, (my long deceased father who was a very scary disapproving man) let me share with you what flowed out of me at that moment that looked somehow like he had written it to me.

Bob, I give you permission to be good enough, to be impressive and accomplished. Permission to be favored of God and happy in all things”

Unexpectedly powerful beyond explaining, unexpectedly freeing and empowering.

It has been a very good week!

Cool Runnings

MKMMA Week 17 Is Haanel Trying To be Insulting or is he just Clueless?

MKMMA Week 17  “Is Haanel trying to be Insulting or is he just Clueless?”

I thought that I had gotten my venting about Haanel’s drift away from reality out of my system last week, but he just gave me too much to work with this week, so welcome baaaaack.

Really though, first of all I have to compliment him on some great helpful stuff.  17:13, 17:15, 17:28 lots and lots of good stuff this week as is the case most weeks. The man had an enormous amount of good stuff to say.  Unfortunately, to really be able to accept all that he says and get the most value from it, an inquisitive person will likely ask very frequently, things like, “well how do you know Frank?”, where did you learn this stuff?  Who are the other scholars in world history that agree with you? Are there any great teachers that disagree with you, and if so, what answers do you have for them? This works for me, and I’m figuring things out and learning lots, and then I open up Part 17. Right off the bat he comes after me, “The kind of Deity which a man, consciously or unconsciously, worships, indicates the intellectual status of the worshipper.”  I’m not really very annoyed with this arrogant and somewhat pompous statement, because it can be spun to really mean anything one wants, so whatever, but then he strings one overgeneralization after another in the next two paragraphs of the introduction and generally destroys any credibility he might have had as a careful student himself.  Quite disappointing.

Or is it really…..am I really disappointed that he is forcing me to think for myself?  Do I really care if he completely distorts the reality of warfare between the city states of Joshua’s time?  Frankly, as I set down to write this post through the fog of a nasty and persistent head cold, I realize that I’m very likely over caring about Frank Haanel’s errors. I can learn from anyone I choose, and I am learning lots from this MKMMA experience Haanel or no Haanel. I have lived 60 years now (yesterday was my birthday) first learning and then following my old blueprint. Its time for a different approach. Though I don’t agree with some of his apparent priori assumptions, I’ll quickly point out that I don’t agree with a bunch of what I was taught as a child either. I am God’s greatest miracle, I’ve got this.  YAHOO things are lookin GOOD!!!!!!!!!

Now I’m going back to bed. J

MKMMA Week 17 Oops, No, 16

MKMMA Week 16   Higher Law

I’m afraid I’m going to have to entertain you once again with a discussion of Frank Haanel.  As the weeks have rolled by in our MKMMA journey, I have grown increasingly suspicious that Mr Haanel is very  fixated on proving that there is no God. To give respect to his interest in precise and carefully crafted language, I’ll expand that to state that he seems intent on convincing us that there is no external Person or Force with Personality who is controlling or even influencing our lives.  I don’t know if I am describing his position accurately, but this is my suspicion.  Why you might ask, does that matter to me? Quite frankly, I don’t know for sure, which is part of what is making studying him so interesting. I’m pretty sure I know, but I’m having to really work on the language to describe it.  He is challenging me to make sure my language is clear and meaningful, before I criticize his language, which is easier said than done if I am to be honest.

It’s easy to know how to respond when I read something as intentionally “blind” as 15:2.

“All the great eternal forces act in solemn silence, but it is in our power to place ourselves in harmony with them and thus express a life of comparative peace and happiness.”

“Solemn silence” are you kidding me Hannel?  Have you never heard of the cross of Calvary? As much quoting of the Bible as you do, did you somehow miss that the Creator of the universe let his body be killed by the very humans He had created to make a point? A point that had been shadowed throughout many cultures before it came to pass, and continues to crop up in new cultural discoveries to this day.

It’s harder to know how to respond to statements that just sound like he’s trying to be as cryptic as possible so that his writing can’t be held to any rational standard of clarity. Try the introduction to Part 16 for instance:

“The vibratory activities of the planetary Universe are governed by a law of periodicity. Everything that lives has periods of birth, growth, fruitage, and decline. These periods are governed by the Septimal Law”

What?…a LAW of periodicity….a Septimal LAW? Where does one find these LAWS written down? Then in the last paragraph of the introduction he tells us that “a higher law will control all other laws” Unfortunately he doesn’t tell us what that “higher law” is, or Who or What created it.

Mr. Haanel, are we to believe that it is our thoughts that have created the Laws? 16:17 states, “Therefore, to control thought is to control circumstances, conditions, environment, and destiny.” Wonderful insight, but only useful if I believe in the certainty of the “Laws”, which it’s a bit difficult to do if you won’t tell me where they came from, and what or whose authority they carry.

MKMMA Week 16 Looking up Words

MKMMA  Week 16 Looking up words

I have to tell you I really have started enjoying looking up words again. I used to look them up all the time.  I enjoyed knowing exactly what words meant, but then I think I began to believe that I already knew what all the words meant, and so I stopped. This class however, has made me get my dictionary out and let me tell you, I have great dictionaries; great big 4 inch thick “Webster’s Encyclopedic unabridged dictionary of the English language” kind of dictionaries. This week I think I almost wore my dictionary out and the word that gave me the most trouble was “nature”. Now I’ll tell you, Mr Og Mandino and I have been getting along pretty well, but calling myself “nature’s greatest miracle” well, frankly, that was annoying. Why “nature”? Would it be that terrible to say that I am God’s greatest miracle? After all the progress that science has made destroying the myth of “natural selection” or “evolution” do we really still have to be afraid of having an “intentional” creator?  I was getting into of fine tizzy, and then it occurred to me that maybe I should actually look up the word. Sure enough Webster has 21 different definitions of the word “nature”. I think the one that Mandino is probably using is number 10. “Nature: the sum total of the forces at work throughout the universe”. Well now we’re getting somewhere because of course if you want to avoid calling the Creator of the universe “God”, you could give Him nifty impersonal names like, “The Universal Mind” or even less personal, “Universal Substance”. You could even move off into the bizarre and use euphemisms for “God” such as “the carpenter from Galilee” or the ever popular “Great Teacher” (in spite of the fact that He referred to himself as God which either is true, or makes him nuttier than a fruitcake which pretty much disqualifies him as a “Great Teacher” don’t you think?) Either way, I’ll accept that Webster’s 10^th definition of nature works in an umbrella kind of way when describing how I was created. I am nature’s greatest miracle if  we can agree that God is the sum total of the forces at work throughout the universe. I’ve heard that there are people that have problems with saying it that way, and I’m quite certain that Haanel  is one of them. He seems to be trying quite hard to eliminate any possibility of Divine interference in his life. I came across book a friend gave me 10 years ago for my birthday by one of the great thinkers who lived right about the time that Mr Haanel was writing and teaching. Mr. CS Lewis. He weighs in on this subject in a little piece where he talks about people calling God “life force”.  See what you think of this.

 “One reason why many people find creative evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.  When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If on the other hand you want to do something rather shabby, the Life- Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

I have come to MKMMA to learn and I sure am, half the time I’m not even sure I’m smart enough to know what questions to ask of our erstwhile instructors, but I know one thing, there is some real difference between these points of view,  and I sure  would love to hear a conversation between Mr’s Haanel and Lewis!  Wouldn’t that be something?

MKMMA Week 14 Night at the Movies

MKMMA Week 14 “Night at the movies”

I was delighted with this assignment because I’m really a movie buff. Or more truthfully, as my life has become less and less fulfilling, I’ve really become an escapism buff. My preference though is escape material that might help me move back out into the sunshine and accomplish something, so I was excited about watching all these movies.

The one I’ll comment on here is “October Sky”. I have seen it several times before and the first couple times I was focused on the pain I felt from the Dad’s dismissiveness. It struck too close to home, bringing back memories except that my Dad never did come to any of my childhood “rocket launches”. This time though, I was concentrating on the son  and his “I want to go into space” dream. It is interesting to me that his dream wasn’t to build a rocket, that was just a stepping stone towards his dream, that someone else suggested to him. By that I’m referring to his teacher’s suggestion that what he had done for “fun” i.e. build a toy rocket, might actually win him a science fair and thus a ticket to a college education that would get him closer to the space program and his dream of space.

According to the movie and some other material I have read about him though, he never actually made it into space. So that has made me wonder, “what actually were his PPN’s”?  I think one of them must have been Freedom. Freedom to get out of Coalville, Freedom to think as hard as he wanted too, Freedom to consider outrageous things possible. Another might have been Legacy, one of the class room scenes has him enraptured as the teacher talks about how things will never be the same now that a satellite had orbited the planet.  He seemed excited about the potential for positive change that the future seemed to hold, and that he so much wanted to be a part of.  It would be fun to know if he really described his passion as being to get into space as the movie does, or was it to be a part of the space program, was it to invent things related to space etc. I don’t know and it’s still a great movie, and had a great effect on me.

I was struck again, by how vague (by contrast) my DMP is. How thick the cement around me is. So in the final analysis, my take away from watching October Sky was perseverance.  Stay the course, plow on, plow on, plow on.  Yes my picture is still too fuzzy, but will it get any clearer but giving up?  My magnifying glass still moves around too much, but will turning the TV back on start a fire?  Nope, I am sure that I, that we, are on the right path.  I am growing and learning of that I’m certain, I cannot, I will not turn my back on this now. There is too much joy to find too much good to do, and I’m not gonna miss out on any more.  Come on New Year, I’m ready for the best year of my life!

Cool Runnings my friends,

MKMMA Week 13 Wrapping Christmas

MKMMA Week 13  Wrapping the Law of Substitution as a Christmas present, for ME

 

I grew up in a family and church that expected perfection. None of us ever reached it, but that sure was the standard if you wanted to be “good enough”.  I got a couple cool things out of being raised that way, a great case of Low Self Esteem, and an excellent ability to pass judgment on everyone I meet.

As you can imagine, this ability comes in really handy at family gatherings, I mean what is more certain to bring people together than “Passing Judgement” to isolate out a few of the family members that don’t come up to my exacting standards.  I of course also was able to build alliances with the others who were “like me” so that we could all pat ourselves on the back for being “nicer” than the few we disagreed with.

You can probably also imagine, that nothing about this brought me or anyone else real joy. A sense of being with those who are in “the “right” is no substitute for the sense of being in harmony with everyone.  This year as I caught myself starting to pray that “God would keep them from being disruptive and hurting people’s feelings” I decided trying to use God’s laws to bless our family gathering instead of hoping that He would somehow “intervene” so that I could blindly ignore His laws as in past years.  I started with “Substitution” going to each one in my mind who had been hurtful in  past years, and “silently saying I love you” then I found something about them that I knew to be good and thought about that facet of their personality for a while.  Two significant things came from this. The one I expected was the warm sense of delight and anticipation I began to experience thinking about enjoying time with them focusing on their good instead of dreading the eruption of their  unpleasantness. The unexpected, was the picture of me that began to emerge. I was given the opportunity to acknowledge and face the drama and unpleasantness I had created over the years. I got a chance to see how my insecurity and the judgmental self righteousness that I tried to use to hide behind, had helped create the very unpleasantness I dreaded.

What a delight to have a different way to think, what a burning thrill to know that this year would be different, that I am different. Knowing that God’s laws work, that my thoughts do create my reality, I am not a helpless pawn having to beg a distant and perhaps preoccupied “God” to come make things better. I instead get to thank that “God” for putting laws in place that I could choose to learn and then choose to apply. Laws that I can count on to “shine in my eyes, unwrinkle my brow, bring a smile to my lips and echo in my voice”

So Merry Christmas to you MKMMA family, thank you for helping me learn, for encouraging me to stay the course, for sharing your journey’s with me. I am blessed and enriched, and this season of many special holidays and celebrations, so are the people I love thought the changes in me.  Just think, all this and its only week 13!!!  YAHOO