Create Good Things

Posts Tagged ‘success’

Talismans and amulets have played a significant role in helping individuals to live more successfully over the last several hundred years, but do they still have a place in the lives of those of us who work with the Law of Attraction? The short answer is yes, but the form which our talismans and amulets might take will usually be quite different from the forms used earlier in history.

Both talismans and amulets can be defined as objects which were viewed as being endowed with a magical quality of some kind. In general terms, talismans were carried or worn on the person in an effort to attract a certain quality of condition (for example, good luck or greater financial success) whilst amulets were mostly carried or worn to provide protection against negative forces such as bad luck.

In previous centuries, where the belief in ritual and personal deities was much more common than it is today, talismans and amulets often featured ritual symbols and/or depictions of a deity (or several deities) associated with the intended use of the object. As such beliefs dwindled, so did the use of talismans and amulets, and where their use continued, the design of talismans and amulets changed to better suit the new understanding of how the universe worked.

There is much anecdotal evidence that talismans and amulets were effective in helping those who used them to live better lives. Talismans of health often gave their users a much-needed energy boost, and talismans of luck and wealth really did seem to make their owners luckier and wealthier. In ages past, it was thought that this was due to the external forces depicted on the talismans and amulets favouring the owner, but when we look at the subject with our modern understanding of the Law of Attraction and how the universe works, it is easy to see that talismans and amulets worked in a much more practical way.

In brief, people believed in the power of talismans and amulets. As any regular reader of Create Good Things will be aware, the power of belief is the force which changes our lives from the inside out (see The Magic of Believing). If we believe that we are getting stronger, wealthier, luckier or more attractive then those are the qualities that we will attract into our lives. Whether we believe in our own intrinsic power as spiritual beings or we put our faith in a symbolic object, it is the belief itself which brings about change.

This does not mean that those of us with a modern understanding of the Law of Attraction cannot gain benefit from using talismans and amulets. There is definitely value in carrying a physical symbol of a desired condition or quality on our person at all times, as every time we see that symbol – directly or peripherally – the subconscious mind will automatically begin to dwell on the associated condition, and that in turn will help to speed the manifestation of that condition or quality in our lives.

The good news is that virtually any small object can be used as a talisman or amulet – the important thing is to associate your chosen object with the end result that you want to achieve. For example, you could obtain a key fob and view it as a talisman which will help you to grow healthier and stronger, or you could obtain an unusual coin and view it as something that will help you attract greater wealth and success into your life. If you are so inclined you could even make a talismanic object of your own by inscribing a personal symbol onto a metal disc (blank medals or dog tags are useful for this).

Whatever object you choose as your personal talisman or amulet, be sure to keep it on your person at all times – on a chain around your neck, or in your purse, wallet or pocket. That will ensure that you encounter the symbol several times a day and keep your subconscious mind working with the Law of Attraction to manifest your goal.

Creative visualization is one of the most popular metaphysical techniques in the world. If you have been reading the articles here at Create Good Things for a while you will certainly be familiar with the concept: If you want to manifest something or some quality in your life, you should sit down on a regular basis and visualize yourself as already having that thing or quality.

Unfortunately, some people find that they can’t seem to make visualization work for them. It doesn’t matter how hard they try, the results just don’t come. It’s as if something is actually preventing the manifestation from taking place.

In most cases, something really is preventing the process, and that ‘something’ is the self-image of the individual.

Your self-image is the mental representation of who you truly believe you are. In most cases it consists of one or a series of mental images which represent, as far as your subconscious mind is concerned, the ‘real you’.

Now here is the vital point: Your subconscious mind will never allow you to experience anything in life which is in conflict with your self-image. No matter how hard you work, visualize, affirm or meditate, your self-image will always dictate what can and what cannot be manifested in your life.

Since this is the case, you should now be able to understand why visualization and other similar metaphysical techniques don’t work for some people. In almost all such instances, the self-image of the individual over-rides all metaphysical efforts in an effort to preserve the ‘status quo’. Let us give you an example of how this often takes place.

Jane, a young lady in her mid-twenties, had learned about creative visualization and decided to begin using it to increase her level of career and financial success. Every day for several months, Jane sat down and visualized the things she wanted in her life – a fine home, a smart automobile, a rewarding career and financial independence.

Now during the course of this visualization programme, several opportunities arose which could have enabled Jane to realise her ambitions. Yet when she came to take advantage of these various opportunities, every one of them vanished. Job offers were withdrawn for no reason, help which she had been offered from friends and acquaintances was not forthcoming and so on.

After several months of such let-downs, Jane lost her faith in visualization altogether. ‘It just doesn’t work,’ she would tell her friends. ‘I’ve tried as hard as I can, but even when things start looking up, something happens to take me right back to square one.’

The problem in this case wasn’t creative visualization at all. As many thousands of people can testify, visualization is one of the most effective metaphysical techniques there is.

So what was the problem?

The problem was that Jane’s self-image was in direct opposition to the things she was visualizing. Far from seeing herself as a person worthy of success, Jane always felt inferior. She viewed successful people as though they were automatically better and more deserving than she was.

In other words, Jane’s visualization efforts failed simply because she was trying to achieve something which would actually jeopardize her own self-image, and because of this her subconscious mind set to work – acting to prevent her visualized goals from ever becoming a reality.

Now the idea of one aspect of an individual working against another aspect of the same individual may sound strange, but in fact it happens all the time.

Consider a person who wants to quit smoking. He tries once, twice, three times, but he always ends up lighting another cigarette.

Or consider the person who wants to succeed financially. He tries once, twice, three times, but he always seems to end up right back where he started.

In both of these situations – and in a very many others – all that is happening is that the subconscious mind works to ensure that the individual fails. Why? Because the man who smokes has a self-image of himself as a smoker, and the man who wants to succeed financially actually has a self-image of failure and poverty. In both cases, the subconscious mind simply must ensure that they do not reach their goals, because if they did their respective self-images would be shattered.

In the world of metaphysics, the self-image can be likened to the ‘homing device’ on a powerful missile. The homing device is pre-programmed with a definite destination. When the missile is launched it always looks to its homing device for directions. Of course, the wind may blow the missile off track on occasion, but in these cases it simply refers once again to its homing device and corrects its own path so that it finally reaches the destination that has been pre-programmed.

If you are not progressing as quickly as you think you ought to be, in whatever area of life, then the chances are that your self-image is pulling you in a different direction.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that you can deliberately re-programme your subconscious mind with a brand new set of instructions which are automatically geared towards helping you to manifest prosperity, happiness and success in all areas of life, and this is where creating a new self-image comes into play.

The ‘Zone’ is the state of being truly at one with yourself and the universe. It is the place where everything you do is successful, and where your life automatically becomes a richer, more satisfying experience. In this new Entering the Zone series we will describe the zone in detail and present a number of methods for helping you enter it.

Most people have experienced the Zone already at one point or another. Personal experiences of the Zone vary from individual to individual, but all seem to have a few elements in common:

- The feeling that you could not fail even if you tried

- The feeling of total control

- The pleasant feeling of detachment

- Supreme confidence that success is assured

- A deep inner sense of tranquillity, peace and ‘oneness’

Experience of the Zone is not confined to people who practice metaphysics. On the contrary, many people who have absolutely no metaphysical knowledge can experience the Zone regularly, particularly top-class athletes, entrepreneurs and others who are deeply self-reliant. This in itself is a good clue as to how one can enter the Zone deliberately, but more of that later in this series.

Defining the Zone

Before we can talk about how you can deliberately enter the Zone and experience it in a conscious manner, we first need to discuss exactly what the Zone is and why it is so important.

When all is said and done, the Zone is a state of mind. Imagine feeling as though you can do nothing wrong and that circumstances bend to your every whim and you will have a pretty good idea of what the Zone feels like from the inside out. In the Zone you cannot help but feel supremely calm, poised, confident and powerful. You cannot help but be in control.

In the Zone, thoughts seem to be many times more powerful than they usually do. In previous post we have said that your reality is created by the thoughts you think on a moment-by-moment basis. Imagine now that in the Zone a single fleeting thought might have the power of 100 or even 1,000 regular thoughts and you will quickly understand how your reality can be changed at a much faster rate when you are inside that zone.

People who have experienced the Zone consciously describe a number of sensations which stay with them for months, even years, afterwards. Some – particularly athletes – talk of being outside their physical bodies and ‘led’ to success by a force which is incredibly powerful. Others talk about suddenly feeling ‘in tune’ or ‘at one’ with the universe and of being ‘connected’ with everything around them in a very real way.

In other words, people who have experienced the Zone seem to have experienced themselves at the highest level. They have experienced their own infinite power, their own aspect of divinity. They have experienced themselves as the creator of their own lives.

Usually, experience of the Zone is quite accidental. Sportsmen, entrepreneurs and others who rely on themselves rather than on other people tend to find themselves in the Zone without even knowing what it is or how they got there. Because their experience of the Zone came about by accident, it doesn’t tend to happen again. Indeed, many sportsmen and women who have experienced the Zone in this accidental manner describe it as being a ‘once in a lifetime’ experience.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Because the Zone is a state of mind, one can learn to induce this state at will. All it takes is practice and the desire to succeed.

That being the case, the next question which naturally arises is: Why bother? What are the benefits of being able to enter the Zone at will in a deliberate manner?

The main benefit of the Zone is that it helps you experience your own divinity. It allows you to feel infinitely powerful and yet infinitely humble and compassionate at the same time. It allows you to act as creator in your own life, creating new circumstances as easily as creating a new thought.

In other words, it increases your ability to change your life using metaphysical tools and techniques. The Zone acts as a universal amplifier which increases your ability to perceive and use your latent spiritual power.

The difference between working within the Zone and outside the Zone can be likened to the difference between riding a rusty bicycle and a top-of-the-range sports car. Both will get you where you want to go – eventually. But if you want to get to your destination fast then you need the more powerful machine. 

The Zone is the ‘powerful machine’ which will give your metaphysical work the massive boost of power you have always dreamed of.

Life on earth is like a dream. Birth is the moment when the dream begins, and physical death is the awakening. The time in-between – the dream of life – is totally under your control, whether you believe it to be so or not.

Let’s talk about dreams a little, because this is a metaphor which can be very useful.

When you are dreaming, anything can happen. You can be rich or poor, old or young, thin or fat. You can experience anything and everything. You can date celebrities, dine on the world’s most exotic foods, enjoy unlimited financial wealth and even fly through the air like a bird. On the other hand, you could be the victim of a bug-eyed monster, be chased by giant insects or wrestle with crocodiles in a sewer.

The dream is created by you, and no-one else. What you experience in the dream is determined by your frame of mind, your beliefs and your expectations. If, during a dream where you are flying, you suddenly realise that it is ‘impossible’ to fly, you would soon come down to earth with a crash! If, on the other hand, you believe that flight is natural, you would continue to soar until the dream came to an end.

So it is with the physical life, which is but an extended dream of around seventy years – sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. What you experience here in this dream is governed solely by your frame of mind, your beliefs and your expectations. If you think you need to work hard and long in order to make money, then that is what you will be forced to do. If, on the other hand, you believe that money comes to you automatically, then it will!

We realise that this sounds a little simplistic, but it is an essential truth. As a man thinketh, so he is. What your mind can conceive and believe, your mind can achieve. Ask, and you shall receive. These are all ways of saying the same thing:

Limitations in life are created by limitations in the way you think.

Do away with mental limitations and your life can be anything you want it to be!

Of course, breaking through the barrier of mental limitations is not easy. If it were then everyone would be doing it automatically, and there would be no need for a website such as this. 

Breaking free from limitations may mean that you have to discard something that you were brought up to believe as being ultimate truth. For example, if you were brought up to believe that your way of thinking was the only correct way of thinking, you will need to get rid of this idea so that you can truly appreciate the customs, beliefs and essences of other people. This is by no means easy, but if you go with the flow and discard everything except that which you know intuitively, your life will become altogether simpler and more enjoyable. Life will lose any nightmarish quality and will instead become a wonderful, exhilarating dream.

So where does all of this talk about life and death and dreams bring us? Well, let us summarise the principles that have arisen from our discussion in this series:

- Our physical lives are finite. Death is inevitable, but not to be feared. Death is a gateway – a gateway home to the place where you truly belong.

- Because our physical lives are finite, we should make sure that we use every minute wisely. We should, when the time comes, be able to greet death with a smile and say, ‘I have accomplished and experienced all that I wanted to accomplish and experience.  I am ready to go home now.’

- Our life experiences are determined by our beliefs and expectations. Just as a dream is created solely through our own consciousness, so are the experiences of our physical lives.

These principles form the cornerstone of all forms of advanced spiritual knowledge, and so it should come as no surprise that we here at Create Good Things view them as being vitally important.

Changing The Dream

You visited Create Good Things because you want to change some aspect – or perhaps a few aspects – of the dream we call physical life. You want to enjoy a greater level of material success and prosperity, or you want to experience a better level of health, or you want to improve your relationships, or you simply want to increase your spiritual knowledge and power.

All of this is perfectly possible. All you need to do is recognise that change comes from within, and that you hold the key to your own success. We can show you different ways of turning that key, as it were, but it is you who must actually turn it. Just as you must follow a recipe in order to make a cake, so you must apply what you read here at Create Good Things if you actually want to get tangible results.

With that new understanding in mind, why not visit our Archive page and explore the information that we have made freely available for your benefit? Diligently apply what you learn and you will be able to start changing the dream of life as you desire.