I've been thinking of doing this for a while, but finally decided to make an abridged version of my book, 'Flight of the Tropicbird' and publish it to Amazon in Kindle format under the title 'UNBELIEVABLE'. In this way it will provide more of an immediate message than that contained in the unabridged version.

I think Greg Kuhn has some excellent LOA literature out there, in his 'Quantum Physicist' series. I've recently read 'How Quantum Physicists Build New Beliefs' after reading his first book, 'Why Quantum Physicists Do Not Fail.'It seemed to be a natural progression and makes a lot of sense from someone who understands the link between consciousness and the external world. In this book he coaches you into changing your deep-seated subconscious beliefs as the key to manifesting your desires. He also gives some insight into his own personal circumstances and how just thinking positively just won't work if it's not aligned with your actual beliefs. He really tries to impress upon the reader the importance of your thoughts in creating this vision as opposed to your actions. I'd recommend his book to anybody thinking of embarking on this journey. It was interesting to note that at his lowest point, someone handed him a copy of 'The Secret', but he was so disillusioned with this literature that at first he ignored it. When he eventually read it and realised the inherent truth in the text, he also realised that the book didn't really spell it out in practical terms. That led him to 'Ask and It Is Given', a book that I will seek out soon as well. From that and his own experiences he developed his own plan. As you will see in his book, his personal 'miracle' was wiping out $1 million dollars of debt within the space of a year by working through his own mental plan of action day by day and seeing how the Universe manifested solutions. It makes for a fascinating read. It also makes you put his plan into action, afterall, what have you got to lose?

We All Have to Change

We all have to change. We all have to conduct this experiment upon ourselves. What sort of human being do we want to be? +Srinivas Rao has just inspired me to write more in this vein as he reminded me of something I wrote in my own book Flight of the Tropicbird, something which was one of the main underlying philosophies of that tome. At the beginning of the book I have a quote that goes like this:

"The philosophy that you apply to your death is the philosophy that you must apply to your death."

Towards the end of the book I elucidate this statement further:

Imagine being on your deathbed. You are lucid and you have one minute to live. What's important now? Is it important that you made millions of dollars? Is it important that you worked for thirty years for a corporation that gave you a gold watch when you left? Is it important that you sacrificed your youth for a career that paid you very well and yet reduced you to ill health due to stress and worry? Is it important that you have a nice, new luxury car sitting in your garage at home? No, these things are not important at all. Because if you are on your death bed, with one minute to live there's only one thing you will ask yourself: 'Who did I love in my life and who loves me?' At the end of the day, when it comes down to it, when you are about to breathe your last breath, the only thing that matters is love. All the material things in your life count for nought. You are not going to take them with you. You will, however, take love with you and leave love behind. The people you loved will think about you, they will laugh about the things you said and did, they will remember you and they will cry about the fact that you're not here anymore. You cannot give a greater gift that that at the end of your life. And so, this is the thing that has me perplexed. Why, when we all know that we are going to die, do we spend our whole lives ignoring this? Why don't we think about that last minute and apply that thinking to our whole lives? I just know that whatever is wrong with this world, it will be a whole lot better if everyone did that.

Turn on the Bunsen Burner

So, I digressed a little in the last two posts and now need to get back to the experiment. I read something interesting in +Pam Grout's book E-Squared about +Buckminster Fuller . If there's one thing I took from the whole book it was a little snippet of information in there about him. Buckminster Fuller was a fascinating man, a polymath of sorts, well-celebrated in life and death. However, it wasn't always that way. Even though he was an intelligent man who attended Harvard (but was kicked out), at the age of 32 he found himself thinking of committing suicide due to the death of his 4-year old daughter and the state of poverty he suddenly found himself in. Then he had an epiphany whilst on one of his long walks around Lake Michigan. He recounted this epiphany and vision as being suspended above the ground in a sphere of light when a voice spoke to him, saying:

"From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others."

From then on he chose to embark on "an experiment, to find out what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

I never knew this about Buckminster Fuller, so was intrigued as I had encountered him several times through my life, as I wandered through various books - his is the sort of name that crops up every now and again.

So, what I want to know is, are we all capable of starting our own experiment similar to Bucky? Are we all able to turn on the bunsen burner and change the world for the better? More thoughts on this soon...

Goodreads Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Flight of the Tropicbird

by Etienne Jackson

Giveaway ends December 21, 2013.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

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Mountain Metaphor

The reason I've called this blog Message from the Mountain is because that's where I want to be. I'm not there yet, but I hope I'm a little way up, as opposed to being in the valley. I like mountains, not only literally because of their presence, but because they can be such a powerful metaphor. The background here, a case in point, is Mount Kenya, the second highest mountain in Africa. I climbed it many moons ago, but the memory of it is still vivid and inspiring. I remember getting to the park gates at the bottom of the mountain and the rangers wouldn't let me in because lone hikers had been mauled to death by lions in the past. For some reason that didn't put me off - such is the confidence of youth! So I waited an hour for someone else to show up and started walking up the jungle-clad trail with them. For some reason though I became impatient because this group were always stopping and I wanted to get to the meteorological station at 10,000ft as fast as possible. So, I grabbed a large stick and started walking off on my own. The stick wasn't meant to operate as a staff to aid my walking. The stick was my protection against wild lion attack. I'd like to somehow go back into the past and stop that young version of myself and have a conversation with him. I'd say something like this: "Are you stupid? Do you really think that this flimsy stick will protect you against a lion? Have a think about it. You're in Africa for chrissakes! Didn't you just go to the Masai Mara and see prides of lions eating antelopes whose bloody entrails you saw on the crimson-stained savannah? Now, walk back to that group, be patient and hike up the rest of the trail with them. It's called survival and you're just not playing the game very well."
Yes, I'd try to say that to him, but it probably wouldn't work. At that age, you're invincible. You don't understand fear. You have no conception of what it's like to live amongst wild animals. You've lived in towns and cities up until this point and the wildest thing you've encountered so far is a squirrel. So the risk of being eaten by a lion just isn't on your radar.
I digress, but I will surely pick up this story a bit later.
This experiment by the way, is one hell of a mountain. I think if I'm going to conquer it though, I'm going to have to try and think like my invincible younger self.

The Start of the Experiment

This week I've started an experiment on my life. I've been stuck for a few years now. Well, probably around seven years. It's been that long since I discovered that the world I thought that I lived in is not the actual world at all. That sounds like a bit of Matrix-like mumbo jumbo, but Matrix is an apt analogy in this case. No, I don't believe I'm hooked into a neural computer and this life is an illusion (well, let's hope not), but there's some 'spooky action at a distance' (Einstein's words, not mine), non-local, synchronistic strangeness to the world that involves private thoughts inside your head and 'material' things in the outside, 'objective' world. One of the problems with this is that even though a large body of scientific material written by lots of exceptionally smart people since approximately 1928 under the general banner 'quantum physics' points to the fact that human consciousness is entangled with the the outcome of experiments at the sub-atomic level, once you start broaching the subject with people you, well, how should I put this delicately: you start to sound crazy. And that's not because you are crazy in a clinical, get-me-to-the-chez-long type of way, but simply because it's not the current accepted paradigm for the way the world works. So in many ways you come across as a person in a pre-Renaissance world who's trying to convince everyone that the world is not flat, or a Copernican who thinks that the Earth is revolving around the sun whilst everyone else thinks the complete opposite.

The reason I'm stuck is that in the back of my mind (and you have to have some quite incredible experiences to convince your rational mind that this is actually happening) I know that this mind-connected-to-external-world scenario exists, but I have no control over it. Things happen at random, seemingly without my input. So, in order to get out of my stuckness, I went looking for books written by other people - the sorts of things that would help me do something about this, because surely you can do something with something as amazing as this? Surely if the world out there is somehow connected to the world in here, then you should be able to enact control of some sort.

So, after starting to think about this, I quickly came across +Pam Grout 's book, E-Squared and read it in a matter of hours. That led me to Manifesting by Alexander Janzer  and another one I'm currently reading called Quantum Physicists Do Not Fail by Greg Kuhn.

Each of these is offering some very helpful advice. So I've put this advice into action. I'm starting to think about these things. So that's what this blog is about. It's going to be a diary of an experiment: an experiment on my life.