ILLUSIONS OF SELF PART I – BASIC EDUCATION

by Marilyn J. Muir

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The following is a transcript of a four-part lecture series I gave some years ago.  The class was structured according to instructions I received through my Inner Guide Meditation (more on that in the Introduction below).  Because these were live classes, with a fair amount of back-and-forth among teacher and students, there is rather a lot of repetition.  I’ve resisted the temptation to abridge the material, instead opting to be as faithful as possible to my teaching instructions and preserve the process at work.  The transcripts have been only very lightly edited to make things easier to read and understand.

We will cover:

  • Part I – Basic Education
  • Part II  – Freedom of Action
  • Part III – Sense Distortion
  • Part IV – Altruism and Selfishness

INTRODUCTION:

What we are going to be doing in this lecture series is something a little unusual.  I’d like to share with you the story of how this occurred so you will understand its origin and purpose.

For a few months, I’ve been doing Inner Guide Meditation.  This is a meditation in which another person helps you to achieve your meditative state by verbally leading you through a series of specific steps.  Once you have achieved your altered state of consciousness, your helper (or External Guide) records your verbalization (through note taking or by recorder).  I had been doing this meditation for three or four months.  I was questioning the fact that I had some new classes coming up, so I took that thought into the meditation with me.

During this meditation, I was told not to teach the Ministry class as I had intended.  That was the first thing that come through.  I asked, “Why?”  My Inner Guide replied, “There’s a piece missing (from the class).  We want you to teach a course in Metaphysics.”

While I teach metaphysics throughout my courses, I’ve never specifically taught a course in “Metaphysics”.  When I teach Astrology, metaphysics is involved.  When I teach Healing, metaphysics is also involved.  I include metaphysics in everything I teach.  I was a bit puzzled by this information, but within a few moments, the balance of the information was given to me.  So that you’ll understand what we’re doing in this class, this is the meditation exactly as it happened.

One of the first things that this particular guide said was that “I needed to let things float free or to draw an image of them”.  Well, I don’t draw.  You give me a ruler and I can screw up a straight line.  I’m terrible at that, but I’m supposed to be letting things flow.  The guide said to “begin in the lower left-hand corner and first outline”.  Next, he said, “Everyone likes to teach in straight lines :

We want you to teach in this way:

Looks to me like stair steps.”  This is the way I’m seeing the image, which I verbalized and my helper recorded.

Then he said , “The bottom step represents ‘Basic Education’.  The second step has to do with ‘Freedom of Action’.  The third step has to do with ‘Sense Distortion’, which is  more than illusion.  The fourth step has to do with ‘Altruism and Selfishness’.  The name of this course is ‘Illusions of Self’’ and the objective is to see the trap.”  I just about came flying right out of that meditation.  I thought, “How in God’s name am I going to do all this?”  I internally said to my Guide at that point, “I hope someone’s going to give me a bigger clue as to what you want me to do.  It’s nice that I have the title!”  All I was told to do was, “Just let it happen!”

Most of you don’t know me personally at all.  When I do any kind of “sermons”, I’m not into sermonizing.  I like to call them “talks”.  I’m not into giving a 45-minute sermon, while you try to keep yourself awake as I, the Minister, drone on and on about something that doesn’t really serve any purpose to you.  I would rather be more succinct, i.e., have it be ten minutes of information you can use.  To heck with the 45-minute sermon – we’ll do something else.  What I prefer to do, and what I have been doing for some time, is not planning my talk.  I prefer to just let the topic happen.  That’s literally “channeling” –  allowing yourself to be open so God, or Spirit, or Guides, or the Holy Spirit, or whatever you want to call It, has a channel to get across the kind of message that the people in that room need.  I’ve been doing that for some time.  Many times when I’m teaching my regular classes (which are all neatly outlined so I know exactly what I’m going to teach), every once in a while, something will come through that I don’t even remember thinking about.  I recognize, “Okay, it’s apparently necessary for the people in the class.”  Sometimes this unexpected topic can take up an entire class.

The most dramatic example I can remember was getting all the equipment out to teach a Healing class about pyramids.  I had taught this class several times.  With no prior warning, I ended up doing the class on relationships.  This means I started out to do pyramids, and forty-five minutes later I was still saying, “I don’t know how I got into this.”  It just happens.  That’s what falls into the category of “channeling”.  I’m a teacher, but I’m not supposed to be teaching things in a regimented fashion.  If you’re into Self-Awareness, you have to get by regimentation and into a more spontaneous form.

The reason I have gone into an explanation is so that you will understand how this class came about.  At the end of the four stair-steps, I hope you will see the “trap”, because I would like to see it too.  I don’t know how to see the trap, and I’ll tell you that right up front.  Much of what’s going to occur here is going to be spontaneous. I have no idea why this was selected.

I’ve studied metaphysics for eleven years. I do have a working knowledge of it, but I’ve never sat down and outlined a course specifically for teaching it.  I’ve done a tremendous amount of reading.  I studied Science of Mind for five years.  This discipline teaches you to be more self-aware and to manifest more of life.  Everything I do and teach is going to reflect eleven years of the study of Spiritualism and Occultism, eleven years study of Metaphysics, five years of Science of Mind, eight years of Astrology and other related subjects.  What you’re going to get is a sort of a weird blend of all of these.  If an illustration of a point I am trying to make occurs to me, it will come popping out of my mouth.  I will tell you the most personal things you’ve ever heard.  It doesn’t seem to bother me at all until I think, “Oh, my, what did I do?  I just bared my soul.”  But it seems to me that if it serves as an example, I will use it, and I trust that no one will use it against me.  If I use other people as real-life examples, usually I won’t identify them.  That way I don’t break any trusts – so your secrets are safe with me.

BASIC EDUCATION

One of the first thoughts that struck me is that we have to recognize that we start to get “educated” the instant that we’re born.  Starting from that very first breath.  For a long time, doctors just patted the new little kid on the fanny and got him to cry, because they felt it was important to get the lungs functioning and cleared out.  Education starts really early – you breathe one time and someone gives you a crack on the fanny!  Now, they have discovered that it creates a very traumatic psychological impact in a newborn child to be struck.  Now they’re trying all sorts of different methods:  rubbing the back, rubbing the feet, and all sorts of other things.  They’ve even got babies now being born into saline solution – where the mother is actually propped in a vat of warm water and the baby issues forth into the water.  The purpose is to replicate the uterine environment and to avoid the trauma of birth.  Striking a child creates a loud noise.  This, together with being hit on the fanny, is a heck of a way to begin life.  So you need to recognize that education is instantaneous.  Most times the circumstances are not going to be under the control of a little child.

I think it is exceptionally important for us to recognize that we are consciousnesses, not just physical bodies, even though we are constantly identifying with our physical bodies.  If someone asks you, “Who are you?”  One of your reactions is to touch yourself in some way.  That’s one of the normal things you do when someone asks you this question, you reach up and touch yourself.  That’s because you identify with your physical body.  But this is a limitation.  You are far more than your physical body… you’re not limited to it.  This is part of the “trap”.  Once you start to explore metaphysics or self-awareness, you stop identifying so strongly with the physical body.

At this point, I’d like to introduce a bit of religion.  I may be a Minister and this may be a church, but I don’t usually get into heavy dogma or a bombardment of heavy religious principles.  However, it might be helpful to discuss some philosophical ideas to create an atmosphere of common understanding.

Number one:  When I work and when I counsel, whatever I do, I don’t deal with you just as a physical body.  Now, when we get into physical healing, we do work with the body.  Metaphysicians recognize that the physical level seems to be a manifestation of something that has been caused on a higher level.  Whatever you are as a physical body, whatever you’re experiencing in this life, seems to be an end result of something that’s going on on a higher level of being.  Most of the time, I would like to see what that higher level is, and deal with it as the cause, rather than with the effects.

The first words in the Bible are, “In the beginning, God…”  If you stop and accept it just as it is, I don’t think it’s difficult to understand the story of Evolution.  There’s a lot of confusion between the Darwinian and the Biblical theories of the origin and evolution of man.  Did man descend from apes as Darwin said, or was man created by God as the Bible said?  “In the beginning (was) God, (and He or It) created…”  I find it is easy to follow the development of the consciousness, or what we are right now, just by understanding those first few words.

The Bible says, “In the beginning…”  The beginning of what?  We’re told that God has no beginning and no end.  Yet it says, “In the beginning.”  From our standpoint (which is a finite standpoint), it would be the beginning of what we would call the manifest universe.  “In the beginning, God…”  In the beginning of what we call the manifest universe, God already was.  Whatever it is that we’re marking the beginning point from, God already existed.  “(And) God created…”  Created what and out of what?  If there was nothing in manifestation at the beginning, and yet God existed, then out of what did God create?

The only thing that existed at the “beginning” was God.  So, if God created, God had to create out of what existed at that point, which was God.  I am starting from the premise that we can use the Bible, which seems to be a fairly accurate book.  You’ll discover that all the major World religions’ sacred books have this similar of concept of God.  You can call God Brahman, or whatever you want, but essentially the same concept comes through all of the world teachings.  I happen to be using the Bible as my reference. So, if it is true “In the beginning, God…”, then we can say that all that was created was created out of what existed; and that all that existed at that point was God.  Nothing that exists in terms of the  manifest universe is not God.  That means good, bad or indifferent. Satan is not separate from God.  There can’t be anything that is separate from God.  Evil cannot be separate from God.  That’s getting into a tricky kind of concept; but if you believe that behind everything is one presence – totality, then you have to accept the fact that things that you like or dislike, or agree or disagree with, are inherent in that originating principle, which is God.

A little further on in the Bible it is stated that “Man was created in the image and likeness of God”.  This is the part that gets confusing – what is God’s image?  When I teach the Comparative Religion portion of the Ministerial course, we see that God is referred to (in the Bible) as plural, not singular.  All of the references are to Gods, not God.  There is no singular form for Elohim (Gods).  Elohim is a plural word.  “Gods” is also referred to as masculine and feminine.  So essentially, we’re talking about “and the Gods created man”.  The one God encompasses all the concepts of the gods.  Somewhere along the line, there’s a discrepancy between what was written, what was meant, and what we’ve understood.  If you take just the first few passages, you’re going to get more questions than answers – a very interesting process.

But God created man “in His image”.  What is God’s image?  What is the image and likeness of God?  Is it a physical form?  A deity which resembles the human form is called an Anthropomorphic Deity.  That is a mouthful, but that’s what it’s called.  If you do not believe in a “form” God, then you do not believe that Man was created in the physical image of  God.  Then what exactly is “God”?  What is your concept of God if it is not a physical image?  My own concept, and the concept from which I teach, is that God is intelligence, creativity, light, vibration – all of these words that are not too tangible, plus a few things I haven’t thought of as yet.  My tendency is to think of God as not being tangible as form.

If we were created in terms of a physical God, then we go back to the image of the little old man with a long beard, sitting on a cloud somewhere.  He’s in a bad mood on Thursday because his wife gave him a bad time when he woke up, so He’s going to give the same bad time to whoever is born on Thursday – you know, “To heck with him, I’ll put him right down the tubes.”

To take this a little further, if the Darwinian theory is correct, and we evolved from apes, we also were made in the image of God.  Can you see this big hairy orangutan sitting up there somewhere, determining everything that’s going on?  I have a little bit of a problem with that concept of God… it’s too limiting.

One of the things that you’ll learn the easiest in this field is that you can’t define God.  Because every time you place a definition on what you think God is, you’ve limited the concept.  We can’t describe God because we have a finite consciousness, a finite thinking capacity.  We’re trying to describe the infinite in terms of the finite.  To grow, we must start with the theory that God is larger than our capacity to define It.   Larger than this limited form concept that we’ve been so willing to deal with.

Let’s take that a step further.  If we are made in the image and likeness of a formless, undefinable Being, then what exactly is it that we are?  If we’re not a form, if we’re not a body, made in the image of an anthropomorphic deity, what are we?  If we’re going with the concept that God is larger than that, not really a describable Being, then we are made in the image and likeness of something that’s indescribable!  If we are made in the image of a formless creative intelligence, then what are we?  We’re creative intelligence.  That’s the image – that’s the prototype.  Essentially, we’re consciousness, we’re intelligence.  We have a capacity for concrete reasoning intelligence, and we also have the capacity for abstract intelligence.  We have more possibilities than if we were limited to just a form!  If we were just a form, we would basically have the same limitations that all other form would have.  If we are made in the image and likeness of a superior consciousness, then essentially, we have superior consciousnesses, or at least the potential for them.  I don’t know too many of us who are working with superior consciousnesses, but we apparently have that possibility right there in our future.

So that’s the area that I start from… and this took me a long time to arrive at.  I started off with a nice little Catholic girl’s background.  Then I became a born-again Christian for twelve years… both form-type religions.  Then I  moved into Science of Mind, which talks about this over-view type of thinking; and into Spiritualism, both of which say that God is non-physical and doesn’t have physical properties exclusively.  So I think I’ve pretty much run the gamut from form to non-form.  What I’ve come to realize is that I’d rather deal with your consciousness and awareness, because that’s the part of you that is made in the image and likeness of God(s), and you’ve been given a physical tool with which to have experience.  Your consciousness is the part of you with all the potential.   I’m going to tell you to take care of your physical form because it’s a very useful tool to you. However, I’m going to be less concerned with your physical form than what you’re doing with your awareness.  I want you to think.  I don’t want to see you accept all of your prior conditioning without thought.  You are not a form.  You should not identify with your physical form.  You’ve been taught for years to identify with it.  Well, now it’s time to learn something a little larger than that. 

If you are created in the image and likeness of, if you were created out of what we call “God” who is Eternal, Unchanging, Ever-present… that’s Omniscient and Omnipresent, does it make any sense to you that God would let a piece of Himself die?  What you are essentially created out of is an Eternal property.  God has no beginning and no ending as we understand it.  God understands it, but that’s beyond us right now.  From our point of view, what we understand God to be is eternal, everywhere-present and all-powerful.  That’s our basic concept.  If that is true and we were created out of God, I do not see any common sense in God allowing a piece of himself to die.  If what the manifest creation is is a piece of God – God manifesting as these various things, essentially, we’re dealing with something that would be undying.  It could conceivably change Its form, Its energy field.  It could change the way It expresses Itself, but It would be ongoing – It would still have the eternal property that we call God.  That leaves us a little food for thought… that means you can’t die.  Some part of you can’t die.  There is a part of you that is eternal, that is everywhere present, that has all of the potential – all those properties that we conceive of as God are a part of you.

The easiest way to describe it is to think of this concept in terms of “a drop out of the ocean”.  This drop has all of the properties of the rest of the ocean itself, but it is not the entire ocean.  Potentially, all that the ocean is contained within that drop of water.  But the ocean is greater than the drop of water, therefore the ocean is not totally contained within that drop of water.  Essentially, we can think of ourselves in terms of drops of God-consciousness.  All of the potential of the Godhood is there in that drop, that spark; but yet, God is greater than that.  God is all the drops of God-consciousness and more.  But that little drop that we possess has all of the potentialities and the patterns that are there in the God-consciousness.  One of the neat things that I learned somewhere along the line is that everyone of us is a God in the making.  We are God manifesting Its own perfection, recognizing Its potential, and starting to unfold.  It’s a very exciting time in the life an individual – I consider it to be the neatest time in the whole world, when we suddenly start realizing that potential.  We do more than eat and sleep and walk and talk and breathe… there’s more!  The minute we realize it, we sort of turn a corner in our mid, in our intellect.  It’s totally impossible to go backwards and forget that you ever knew that you had potential!  You might decide not to go forward, you could stagnate  You could decide that “this is scary, I don’t like this too much.”  But there’s no way in the world you can forget that you knew.  That would be like saying to you, “I don’t want you to think of a pink elephant.”  The moment I say “pink elephant”, already you’ve perceived an image or an impression of a pink elephant.  You can’t “unknow”.  You can refuse to follow that perception, or do anything further with it, but you can’t unknow it.

If you are perfect, potentially, if you have all of this creativity, imagination, and intelligence that is the right of the Godhead, this potential perfection in you, why are we settling for what we have?  Why would we be willing to settle for so little?  Supposedly, man uses something like 10 to 12% of the capacity of his brain.  Doesn’t it make you curious to know what else in the world is going on or could be going on inside of your head?  Einstein used 15% – that’s the mathematical theory.  He used 15% of the total capacity of his brain, and he was our greatest genius.  Wouldn’t it be neat to know what else is in there that we can do, that we don’t know about?  That’s one of the things that got me into this field, that I was using only a small percentage of my total capacity.  I thought, “What else can I do?”  Never mind what else you  can do… I want to know what else I can do.  What am I capable of?  So we’ve got this enormous potential riding in us. {Current note: This percentage theory has long since been debunked, but I chose to leave it in because the reasoning is still interesting.}

Now, as a consciousness, as an awareness, you are capable of having all sorts of experiences that may or may not be physical in nature.  How many times have you been daydreaming and actually been startled out of it?  Because it was so real, you got lost in the daydream. It was a world all by itself.  Coming back to what they call “reality” was a bit of a difficult experience, to make that changeover in our minds.  We do have feelings that happen to us.  We have entire intellectual thought processes that never touch physical form, at least not in any way that we can see.  So on all of these different levels, we have different experiences going on that are not necessarily physical in nature.

Sometimes when you wake up out of a sleep, you’ll feel exhausted because you’ll feel as if you’ve worked all night.  Whatever it was you did during your dream caused you to feel physically tired.  You went through all sorts of activity and you didn’t rest.  You’ve also, I’m sure, awakened out of a dream. The most famous one is the flying dream – feeling that you were flying.  That’s the sensation of returning from the astral level (or an out of body experience – OOBE).  Flying dreams have to do with the fact that every time you go to sleep you lose your body anyway.  It shouldn’t be a scary experience. It’s a very natural experience.  You’ve been doing it your entire life.  If you get to do it consciously, while you’re awake, you call it an “astral trip”.  If you do it while you’re not awake, you call it “sleeping”.  A lot of the times you’ll have feelings of flying.  Some people fly in planes, some people become birds… I just usually will myself up in the air.  I can remember one of the last flying dreams I had, with my Father standing about twenty feet below me on the ground, telling me I could not fly.  And I’m saying to him, “But I’m over your head. What do you mean I can’t fly?”  I was very frustrated because I couldn’t get through to him that I could fly.  We all have those types of dreams, and they can be quite vivid and are real experiences on the levels on which they occur.

On non-physical levels, we have non-physical experiences.  Give me a physical manifestation of love.  Tell me a physical thing in terms of love.  Describe it to me physically – does it resemble a chair?  Or a wall?  Is love real?  Even though it cannot be physically touched, even though it is not a chair, and it’s not a wall – is it real?  Yes?  So obviously, your consciousness is capable of experiences on other than a physical level.

Have any of you ever been through abject fear?  How in the world do you define it in terms of floor and couch and chair and wall?  But, boy, it’s real!  Your heart is beating as though it would come out of the top of your head, you get vertigo, you get light-headed, you may faint.  So how can you say it’s not a real experience?  It’s not a tangible physical experience – it is not always happening on the physical level.

For a long time, they didn’t believe in electricity. But stick your finger in a wall socket and find out whether or not electricity exists!  Now we’re getting to the point where we can measure it, utilize it, etc., but electricity was always there!  It’s just that we didn’t have the realization of how to work with it or how to define it.  In spite of our ignorance, it was nonetheless real.  So is your consciousness, your awareness, that can operate on so many different levels.

That’s really the key, that’s really what’s important… remembering how many different ways you can learn, and how many levels you can learn it on.  Stop identifying with the physical body and the physical senses as your only reality.  Almost the entire world reacts in this way.  If you’re sitting here, you’ve turned that corner in your mind. You’ve realized that there’s something other than physical.  You’ve already done that, or you wouldn’t walk through the door of a place like this.  It wouldn’t have any meaning for you – you would think we were all kooks.  Once you turn that corner in your mind where you say to yourself, “There’s got to be more than this.”  And then you go, “Oh!” The first time you say that “oh”, you can’t go back. You can stop right there, but you can’t back up.  I can’t go out there on the street and get you – I can’t go out there and beat the streets to get people, and proselytize.  They’ve got to turn a corner in their minds before they’re open to what’s going on in this room.  Remember, I’m on a barely beginner level still, so you can imagine how many other possibilities are open to me and to you, in increasing our awareness.

The majority of people “out there” have a tendency to determine all their experience by a two-and-a-half-pound blob of gray matter called “the brain” and its five little octopus-like extensions called the physical senses.  All of our life is determined by this little tiny gray mass, and its little tentacles of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell.  When you first get into this field, you hear talk about a sixth sense.  For the longest time, I thought there was a sixth sense – and I did this world-wide search for a sixth sense.  But what they’re really talking about is to stop limiting the five senses we already have to physical reality and start extending them.  Recognizing that your senses are being physically limited, what you really want to do is get beyond the physical sensations and allow the senses to open up.  What we’re looking for is not a separate thing.  We should just keep extending ourselves out, opening ourselves up.  We should not accept the physical limitations – and then not accept the next set of limitations.  Just keep shoving that sense perception out.  That’s the “extra” to me.  Extra-sensory perception is:  Don’t stop at the physical.  It’s not a separate sense.  I started out thinking that it was and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t.  Everything that we need to be, every piece of equipment that we need to have, we come equipped with.  We just don’t use it.  We’re attempting to reach out and grow and do something with ourselves.

You’re aware!  I’m going to be hitting you from this perspective.  You need to be aware of my intent.  I can only tell you what I’ve reached through my experience and through my conclusions.  I don’t have to be right.  I can only tell you where I’ve come to in terms of having been exposed to my experience.  You must not accept at face value what anyone says to you in terms of your education, in terms of your own programming.  Just examine it.  What I’m giving you is food for thought.  I’m not spoon-feeding you a diet of something you’re supposed to be swallowing. I want to get you to think.  Don’t even accept what I say.  Think about what I say.  See how you feel about it.  Think about how you would have felt about it two years ago.  Look at how far your thinking processes have come.  Possibly two years ago you wouldn’t even have walked into this room.  You would have thought, “Gosh, she’s got a screw loose!”  Watch yourself – don’t be afraid to take what anyone says to you and scrutinize it.  If it doesn’t sit right with you, don’t accept it for yourself.  Don’t allow it to go into your subconscious programming.

I said to you that babies are being educated from the instant they hit the world.  I have a little experience to share with you on this thought that I have.  We are consciousnesses, we select our own experience values.  I don’t think there’s a little old man sitting out there somewhere saying, “I’m going to give you a bad time this time around.”  That’s a very limiting concept of God.  I also don’t see a Karmic Board in the sky with a bunch of little old planets, men, women or children, or whatever, determining that we’re going to do all these things.  I think we’re aware.  We all have the potential of the perfection that is God.  We all come equipped with the same potential.  We are just finding different ways to express it.  I think that as a consciousness, we have choices. We have options available.  We know basically what we are right now, based on what we’ve already been.  We remember, at least in this particular lifetime, what we’ve already been.  If we have a certain reaction, it’s probably based on prior conditioning.  So, as a consciousness, we have a recollection of what we’ve been because we’re eternal.  This isn’t a new trip – this is something that we’ve already done.  So, our consciousness is, “Where are we at now?  Where have we been?  What’s the collection factor of whatever experiences we’ve had on whatever level?”  We always know where we’re going, in view of the fact that there’s only one place to go – the Path is God.

One of the neat things I’ve heard about, and no doubt I said it myself more than once, is “falling off the path”.  Getting into the left-hand path, and the right-hand path, and getting off the path, and all that.  Where can you go where there isn’t God?  Regardless of the path you took (and I would hope you chose a fairly positive one), because you’re just going to hamper and restrict yourself and take a little longer if you don’t, but where else is there to go?  Everything that exists is God.  How the heck can you leave?  I mean, there’s no place to get off.  So you’d have to get back on the path, because there isn’t any other path.  There’s no other place to go.  We start off from the only thing that exists – God.  We exist within the only thing that exists – God.  So where are we going to return to?  We return to the only thing that exists – God. Even if we screw up along the way.

Once you start to become consciously aware of your capabilities, you start wanting not to screw up.  You start wanting to do it right. Wanting not to get off in the wrong direction.  You think, “If I go off in that way, I’m going to mess it up.  I’m going to have to pay for it.  I’m going to have to do all this other crap to take care of what I did, so I’ll do it the right way now.”  In other words, you’re saying, “I’d rather simplify my life, to try to figure out what’s the right way to live and stay with it, rather than to pay for all the things that I may not have done right in the first place.”  So it becomes a choice.

I’ve read a lot about, “If you do this thing, you’ll lose your eternal soul.”  Where does it go?  WHERE does it go?  You can’t kill God!  So how can you kill something in you that is God?  You can mess it up for a while, but you have all of eternity to do all your growth – there’s no time limit on when you can do it.  Essentially, if you stop and think about it, you do the best you can wherever you are, make the best choices based on what you know, and try to keep your consciousness headed in a positive direction.  “Falling off the path”, or being eliminated as a non-essential… I don’t think that’s possible.  We’re all a part of God.  We started from God, and we’re working in God, and we’re going to return to God because it’s the only game in town.

The best thing you can do is to realize that you want to do it right.  Don’t hassle yourself with the agony of the damned because you swore, or you got drunk, or you had sex.  “I’m on the path of the Initiate, I don’t have the right to do any of that stuff.”  It’s not that I’m encouraging you to do anything wrong, I’m just saying, “Where are you going to go?  There’s only one place to go.  Here!  You can make your path a lot easier by paying attention to what you’re doing as positively, as constructively as you know how to do it.  But remember, there’s no other game in town, so you really can’t go that far.  You may take the long way around, but you’re going to get there eventually.

One of the things that we’ve done all the way through our whole education system from the instant we’re born is that we’re being told “no”.  I raised my kids (I’ve got four kids) and they seem to have turned out all right.  But there are things that I would change if I could go back and do it over again.  One of those changes is that I would encourage more creativity.  I really feel I encouraged them a lot compared to what I’ve seen many parents do; but I really would find a better word than “no”.  In other words, I wouldn’t just yell, “NO!” or say, “NO”.  I’d try to make it a more positive experience. I’d try to do or say something more positive.

That’s what most people are dealing with out there – it’s the “no’s” that have been built in from the instant they were born.  All of us have had that as a conditioning factor.  “Don’t reach, don’t try. Limit yourself. You can’t do it that way, God’s going to frown.”  We’ve had all those no’s built into us from the instant we were born, starting from the doctor whacking us on the fanny creating psychological disturbances.  Can you imagine how many people are walking around now with psychological disturbances because they were smacked on the fanny?  The noise scared them, and it didn’t feel too good to get cracked, either.  Millions of people are doing that now, and the trauma sets in that early.  There are plenty of people out there who are having children and they are trying to look at the children with a more positive type of upbringing.  Now, I’m not talking about permissiveness.  I’m not talking about letting children get away with things that are dangerous to them or that are abusive to other people. I’m not talking about permissiveness.  I’m talking about encouraging the children to understand the environment, encouraging children to do a little experimenting, a little trying, and to use their creativity.  It doesn’t mean allowing them to get away with murder and become brats.  If you go through the teachings of any of the Initiates, you’ll discover that the Masters can be pretty hard taskmasters.  They’ll really discipline you, because discipline is good for you.  For you to understand how to structure, how to make something count is positive.  That doesn’t mean it’s good for you to learn it as a limitation.

Our limitations started very young and now if we tried to work back to the limitations that have been built into us, we need to first recognize how very aware children are.  I don’t know how many of you have looked into the eyes of a new-born baby and seen something there that looks so old.  In my Astrology chart readings, I talk to people about that in the beginning of the reading.  If you look into the eyes of a brand-new baby, a lot of them look older than you are. It looks like they know something that you don’t know.  There’s a wisdom there!  I’ve come to the firm conclusion that babies know a lot more than we give them credit for.  They’re fresh out of Spirit – they’ve just made the crossing, and I think they know what they’re coming here to do.  They just have no way to tell us.  As far as I’m concerned, a baby is born with the knowledge of what he has in mind to accomplish.  I just think that they flat out don’t have any way to verbalize it.  They’ve got to learn to make the physical body work at their command, and they’ve got to learn a language.  By the time they get around to doing that, it takes them two or three years. And by that time, they’ve forgotten what they wanted to say.  I think a child comes in with all this incredible intelligence.  The child knows.  I’ve had my children look at me and give me a creepy feeling… like they were smarter than I was, and I feel dumb teaching them.  I feel that I should be sitting in their places and have them teach me.  I felt this when they were really little, long before I got into this field.  I think we need to be aware of the fact that our children are so much more aware than we are giving them credit for, from the beginning, from day one.

I’m not talking about some abstraction of new children being born, I’m talking about you.  When you were born, you were aware.  I just don’t think you had any way to communicate your awareness.  I also think you managed slowly but surely to be conditioned because you were so aware and receptive, you purely absorbed it.  You had no way of changing what was going on, you had no way of verbalizing, no way of saying, “No, that’s wrong.”  Remember, if you do something over and over again, even if it’s wrong, it’s a program.  I think you all came in very, very aware, and I think that you were subjected to the same kind of conditioning factors that everyone else was and is.  I’m hoping that we get a little smarter and stop doing that to our children, because they are where our hope is for the future.  We must get a little smarter and start treating them a little better, before all these conditioning factors are built into them.  If you can’t do it with your children, do it with your grandchildren.  Think!  Look at them!  Treat them as if they have some intelligence, from the beginning, and watch for their response.

Some of you have already heard this story, so live with it.  I have this theory I’ve just discussed about the probability that babies know, they really understand.  They’re so close to Spirit at the time of birth, I think they come in knowing.  I was over in Bruni’s Pizza Place here in Fort Lauderdale with my daughter and my daughter-in-law a few months ago.  There was a lady sitting in a booth holding a baby, and she was trying to eat a bowl of spaghetti.  She had a small baby in one arm and was trying to eat her spaghetti with her other hand.  I love babies; I am wacky over little babies.  I even like baby fish. I just like babies.  So I said, “Oh, I think she’s having a hard time eating.  I’ll go see if she’ll let me hold the baby.”  My youngest daughter just gets mortified when I do things like that.  She just cringes.  “Oh, Mother, you’re not going to do that. I’m going to get under the table if you do.”  And I said, “Yeah, I’m going to do that.”  I went over and said, “Would you like to eat your spaghetti with both hands?”  That’s a good way to say, “Can I hold your kid?”  It makes her think it’s her idea.  Her husband looked at me and said, “Really?”  So I said, “Gimme the kid!”

I took this little kid and went back over to my table, and I just loved it.  I was waiting for my dinner, so it didn’t bother me.  I’ve got this little, bright, bouncy baby girl about two-and-a-half months old (her name was Shannon), bouncing all over the place, and rapping and cooing.  I can get babies to talk to me, because I love them.  Babies respond to people who have a lot of affection for them.  I’m having a ball with her.  So I’m just sitting there, chit-chatting with this baby.  My youngest daughter is still under the table – she’s not going to come out until this whole episode is over, because she thinks I’m terrible for doing such things.  In chatting to the baby, I said, “You’re a lot smarter than people think you are.  You know exactly what you have to do with your life, don’t you?  But you just can’t tell me.”  The baby went bananas in my arms!  She started to cry, and went from this laughing child into almost hysteria.  I was so startled to get any kind of a response at all from the baby.  I’m sitting there trying to quiet the baby down, and I’m saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right – I have a map, I can figure it out.  I’m an astrologer.”  And the baby calmed down!  I was not expecting any reaction from the baby!  I was just talking small talk.  The baby honestly came unglued when I said, “You know what you came here for, don’t you?”  It was absolutely incredible.  I’ve not had a chance to try it on a half-dozen other little kids, but give me a chance when there’s a little baby around.  Watch and see if I don’t.  Because I’d like to see if it’s the same type of response (i.e., that baby was aware).  It couldn’t respond to me, it knew what I said, and thought, “Oh, my, somebody who knows what’s going on” type of thing, and just went crazy.  I got her calmed down.  She and I cooed and gooed and laughed, the mother finally came and got her, and I never saw her again.  I learned something. I learned that my theory may not be exactly right, but it’s not too far off.

COMMENT FROM STUDENT:  Why not just do it with thought?

MARILYN:  I think I want to go ahead and try my experiment through the same method a couple of times.  If I’m going to do it, I’ll do it consistently.  I’ll do it the same way several times, and see if the same things occur.  I want to see if I can duplicate the response.  If I can produce a consistent thing, then I’ll try it with thought.  Usually I constantly see babies, but I haven’t gotten around that many recently.  I’m talking about fresh, new ones – little ones.  That one was about two-and-a-half months old.  I’d like to try it with as young a baby as possible and see if I get a response.  I’m not doing anything to harm the baby, I’m just treating the baby as though it is already aware.  That’s all I did. Simply, “You know, but you can’t tell me.”  That’s all I basically said to the baby.  The response was just incredible.

Now, I put that in as food for thought for you.  I want you to realize that you were just as aware as that baby was.  That YOU knew!  You watched a lot of things go on that you couldn’t do anything about.  When someone takes a sentence and repeats it over and over again to you, it will replace whatever else you may have started out with.  That’s programming – that’s conditioning, right from the beginning – from the time we were born.  We discovered very early that if we smiled at Mommy, we got all sorts of things we wanted.  If we cried, it was frustrating. Sometimes we got spanked.  So, crying is bad, smiling is good.  Programming!

Stop and think about what we’ve done with our men!  The young men that are being raised right now are being raised with a little more sensitivity.  They’re not afraid to show their sensitivity.  Think of what we did to our men for years and years.  Talk about women’s lib!  The men are beginning to be allowed to be sensitive.  That’s men’s lib!

Stop and realize how early your education begins.  Smiling is a good idea – it gets me what I want.  Crying is not a good idea – it gets me in trouble!  We started our programming right there.  That’s so darned early.  Now you’re dealing with something that’s occurring right in and out of the labor room.  If I yell, somebody pays attention to me. They may not like it and it may cause me a little trouble.  There are plenty of children out there who want negative attention.  Just as long as they get some attention –  some attention is better than none.  Therefore, if I misbehave, people pay attention to me.  We have children who crave negative attention. They  just need attention.  Some of those children have an overwhelming need for attention, more than a  human being can conceivably supply.  There’s an actual psychological problem going on there.  That’s something the parent needs to understand, that it’s still a cry for attention.

You might ask, “Why are you being bad?”  The answer might be, “Because if I’m bad you pay attention to  me.  The attention might not be too great, you might beat me half to death or you may ground me, but at least you’re hearing me, you’re responding to me.  I can’t get your attention any other way.”  Some children have that really overwhelming need for attention.  More perhaps than a parent (or two) can supply.  We have all sorts of demands on us from outside.  We may not be able to supply all the attention that a troubled child needs.  But that troubled child is continuously going to bid for it, because they need someone to say, “I’m listening, I’m paying attention.”

When I’m teaching dream classes, one of the things we discuss is the impact of the conscious and the subconscious minds, and the difference between the conscious and the subconscious.  I think it’s important, since we’re thinking in terms of education, we need to stop and think about the kind of impact that this has on us.  It’s a piece of what we’re discussing.

What we’re doing right now is essentially a conscious function.  We’re working with our analytical, logical, reasoning mind.  I’m speaking and you’re listening.  This is all pretty much on a surface level.  If I say something that you’ve heard before, your subconscious kicks into gear and you remember it.  That’s what your subconscious function is. It’s a memory bank, a sort of repository of all the thoughts and experiences you’ve had.  In one of the classes I took, we were told to think of your memory being a great, big storage closet with shelves and your thoughts all written on cardboard signs.  Some of those signs are up front, and some of the signs are further back.  Some shelves are not filled up yet, and some are packed tight.  Think in terms of your memory being some sort of storage quilt, and you can retrieve at will.  Some of the retrieval is easy (on the front shelves), and some is a little trickier (higher, deeper or further back).  That’s what your subconscious is.  Your subconscious reacts out of what already has been stored.  Whatever you’ve got in there, whatever you’ve already put in it over the years, when something occurs that requires a reaction, your reaction is going to be based on what you’ve already stored.

Think about all the garbage you’ve stored in your subconscious for years and years and years!  Think about all the things that are programmed in there?  The neighborhood bully taught you to be afraid of red-haired people.  Every time you see a red-haired person, you’re getting a response factor based on your conditioning.  “Uh oh, someone like that is threatening to me,” you’re going to say to yourself.  “Why on earth am I afraid of or don’t like that person?”  You don’t necessarily remember that this red-haired person reminds you of the bully, but your subconscious responses will be that way.  You’re up here on the surface dealing with something that you’re not really conscious of, but you’re responding to it anyway.

When you start taking things like Science of Mind or the New Thought field, psycho-cybernetics and this type of thing, you are taught to reprogram that memory bank.  You learn to think in terms of what’s been stored and what you don’t want to have stored.  Sometimes you can do it just by stopping and choosing qualities that you like, such as courage, loyalty, sincerity, all those positive qualities, and deliberately program them into yourself as an internal quality.  Should you see something you like in another person, take that quality and deliberately program it into your own being, over and over again.  That’s the way the subconscious learns – by repetition.  You can do it that way, or you can have some various psychological reactive patterns come up and hit you right in the teeth, forcing you to deal with them.  You say (to yourself), “Oh, my God, I didn’t know I was like that!”  For instance, jealousy or possessiveness.  It can come up and do a number on your life and give you a bad time so that you HAVE to deal with it.  You’ll say, “Uh oh, I have to get that out of me.  I don’t like that quality in me.  I’ll just have to eliminate that!”  That’s another way of dealing with it.

Another way of dealing with your programming is to use really good suggestive dialogue-type questions.  I did this a couple of years ago. I sort of upset myself when I did this one, but it was still very effective.  It’s called using “the pendulum”.  I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with a pendulum before.  You can ask yourself questions and let your subconscious answer.  Your subconscious is going to give most of the answers when you work with a pendulum.  You could get some influence from outside yourself occasionally, but the bulk of the answers are going to be straight out of your subconscious.  So what?  Do you know any other way to talk to your subconscious?

QUESTION:  How do you erase something that’s already there?

MARILYN:  We’re going to do that here in a little bit.  I think we talked about that when we were doing the “Healing Your Wallet” class.  You can use a pendulum.  A pendulum is simply any weighted object at the end of a cord, a string, a fishing line, etc., it doesn’t really make any difference.  You physically hold it in your hand reminding yourself not to deliberately move your hand, not to will your hand to go this way or that way, round and round, or anything else.  On a conscious level, you’re not doing anything in particular.  If you ask a question, the subconscious will cause the pendulum to make some sort of a motion to answer you.  Usually you start with simple yet or no-type answers.  The interesting thing about doing this is that your subconscious does not always agree with your conscious.  For example, a question like, “Do you believe in God?”  Your conscious mind might way, “Well, of course I do!”  But what happens if your subconscious mind says, “No!”  Then you have two parts of yourself disagreeing. They’re not cooperating with each other.

I have been single eleven years, and I started off with a very bad ego profile.  I’ve learned over the period of eleven years to get my own act together.  In the last four or five years, I’ve come to the point where I felt that men and women are equal.  I no longer believed (as I had been previously conditioned to believe) in the superiority of the male.  Essentially, I thought that I had everything in this area pretty well in balance.

Someone had given me this magnificent list of questions to ask myself, and one of the questions was, “Do you believe in the superiority of males?”  And I don’t, consciously – but my subconscious still did!  Whew!  What would happen when I walked into a relationship?  My conscious mind feels that I’m walking in as an equal partner.  My subconscious is automatically putting me on a lower rung.  Automatically placing me in an inferior role!  And I wonder why I still have a problem with relationships?

I didn’t know what was going on. It was not going on up here in my head where I can see it. It was going on on a reactive, subconscious level.  I thought, “Whoa, back up here.  We’ve got to do something about this!”  The pendulum is good for things like that – dealing with the subconscious mind.

Sometimes meditation brings out subconscious patterns.  What you need to do is start figuring out what’s going on inside your mind.  What’s it (your mind) got programmed?  “I don’t like horseradish.  Why don’t I like horseradish?  Perhaps because when I was five years old, my uncle thought it was really funny to give me a whole teaspoon full of horseradish. I really got a bad dose of it, and I’ll never like horseradish again.”  That doesn’t mean that horseradish isn’t good. It means that the negative programming is so firmly embedded, I may never trust horseradish again.

See what happens?  You need to stop and think, “What’s in there (your mind)? What did we put in there?”

What happens if you had a first-grade teacher who decided that you were a nasty little so-and-so?  How many times a day can you be told you’re a nasty little so-and-so and not come out a nasty little so-and-so?  It has to do with the programming.  If you had a teacher who had you for nine solid months and told you five times a day that you were a nasty little so-and-so, I don’t think that anyone should be surprised if, in the next five or six years, you’re a nasty little so-and-so.  Everybody who says he really is a nasty little so-and-so reinforces the original programming.  Then the nasty little so-and-so grows up, and becomes a nasty big so-and-so.

Does he have to remain that way?  If he suddenly realizes what happened to him, isn’t it possible for him to start doing something with himself?  Does he have to accept the fact that he’s a nasty little (or big) so-and-so?  It may have started when he was five years old. It may have started when he was three.  Does it have to continue?

What about a mother who sees a child pinch his little sister, and says, “You always pinch your little sister!”  The kid may have thought to do it only that one time, but he’s told he always does it, so he’s always going to do it!  The little girl grows up with marks all over her body.  The Mother was dummy enough to say the word “always” for what was going on in the present.

Stop, go back and look at yourself.  Think of all the things that could have happened to you, and all of the things that you’ve carried forward with you.  You are the sum total of those thoughts and experiences, but you don’t have to perpetuate any of them.  You don’t have to allow them to go on.  At any point you can say, “Gee, look at that one!”

Now, I’ll show you how strong the subconscious is, and this is my best example.

COMMENT:  In other words, what you’re saying is that if everyone had received the same type of programming, positive programming, everyone would be beating down the door to study with you today.

MARILYN:  Not necessarily with me, but they would be beating down the door to see how much more they could do with themselves.  They would be so excited about what they were, that they would want a constant exposure to anybody who could help them exercise that potential.  Wouldn’t it be an exciting world to live in?  Wouldn’t it be fantastic if everyone were being creative, having their individuality expressed, without (or with) approval from people around them?

COMMENT:  In other words, what you’re saying is that if you took a bunch of babies, and isolated them away from their parents, and with the knowledge that you have, raised them yourself…

MARILYN:  No, because I don’t think I’m that perfect.  I think I’m still learning, but I think I’m working with uncovering some problem areas that can be dealt with really early, but I think the parents should do it.  No, I don’t think the babies should be isolated.

COMMENT:  I have a feeling that you’re saying that all babies are born with this conscious knowledge that they will have.

MARILYN:  They came right straight from Spirit, and I don’t think that Spirit is dumb in any way.

QUESTION CONTINUED:  So then why are there so few people involved with Higher Consciousness in this vast world?

MARILYN:  Stop and think.  Right now more numbers of people are involved in Awareness programs, but percentage-wise, it hasn’t changed much.  There just are more people on the face of the Earth.  The percentage numbers haven’t changed.  Total numbers have changed because population has grown.  If we were talking about conscious knowledge several thousand years ago, there were only a few Initiates or Masters, or whatever you want to call them.  Usually less than 2% of the world’s population is involved at any time with increasing awareness.   You have to realize how far we’ve come.  How far have we come?  Do you realize that reading and writing was once “occult” knowledge?  Reading and writing itself was hidden, unknown.  At least 98% of the people did not know how to read and write.  It was once “esoteric” wisdom.  It’s now exoteric wisdom, because it has been brought out into the open.  It has now been revealed.  Something as simple as that.  Awareness is drawing the mass of humanity forward, but it’s a small percentage that does the going forward.  Right now, there are more sheer numbers of people coming forward because there are more people on the face of the globe, but the percentages haven’t really changed too much.  That’s fine. That’s all that’s needed.  We needed only one Edison, one Benjamin Franklin.  They brought us forward a step through their intellects and their awareness.  They brought us all a step forward.  If I can touch a few people and make them more aware, then all of humanity is going to benefit by their increased awareness, including me.  I’m part of humanity, too.

COMMENT:  I think part of what Marilyn is trying to get across, and this might answer your question, is that by citing the kind of negative position that we are all subject to in the past can lead us to a point where this conditioning controls our lives.  The point is to develop awareness to the point where we are in control of our own lives and therefore to expand our lives rather than to be driven and controlled by past conditioning.

MARILYN:  It’s two-fold.  If I can make you realize just how much conditioning you’ve been subjected to from Day One, if I can make you realize how much programming you’ve already got in there, you’re going to start improving yourself.  You don’t have to accept that programming; there’s nothing that says you have to perpetuate it.  You’re also going to start watching what’s going into that computer.  That is the function of your conscious mind.  The conscious mind is the doorkeeper – sometimes it’s not paying any attention.  One of the pet things I tell people is, “How many times do you go to sleep with the radio on?”  That’s a direct line into your subconscious.  The subconscious doesn’t sleep.  The conscious mind goes to sleep.  You’ve got the radio on. Do they always play music?  Do they talk to you about wars?  Have you ever heard an announcer on the air telling you about his pet peeve?  Telling you how rotten somebody is, and this company should be banned, and all the rest of it?  Have you ever heard an announcer do that?  What happens when you’re asleep?  The doorkeeper’s asleep!

QUESTION:  Does this penetrate the subconscious?

MARILYN:  Sure.  Your subconscious never goes to sleep.  You don’t need to be awake to learn.  You don’t need to be awake to have your computer programmed.  All you’ve got to do is either hear it, see it, touch it, etc. Your computer’s being programmed constantly.

COMMENT:  You were going to give us something a few moments ago about removing something from our subconscious.

MARILYN:  I was going to show you how sneaky our subconscious is.

QUESTION:  What if you took a person who was a devil-worshipper.   He solemnly believes that Satan is the Almighty.  He goes to sleep with the radio on, and one of these preachers gets on the radio.  His subconscious – what happens when he wakes up?

MARILYN:  Number One, he’s got conflicting programs going on in his subconscious.  He’s got both programs running, because your subconscious does not go to sleep.

I took Alpha classes. The Alpha Training classes, where the teacher will lead you down through our mind levels.  One man slept through the entire weekend, Friday night through Sunday night, he just slept all the way through the whole thing.  The teacher said, “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.  If you can help it, don’t go to sleep.  But if you do go to sleep, don’t worry about it.”  We got to the end of the class and we were all told to do a certain exercise to show what we had learned and what we could do.  He could do it, too. And he slept through the entire weekend!  I mean, we heard him snore!  He was just in there sawing logs.  I said to myself, “I never saw anybody that tired. That man slept two twenty-four-hour days! My goodness, that man can sleep!”  But when we got finished and he was told to work his case, to go through all of the motions, he got just as much as we did.  I thought to myself, “I could have slept!”

This example shows you how subtle your subconscious is.  I just think this is a funny example. It just tickled the heck out of me when it happened.  I went out to have coffee with my son and his wife about midnight.  I’ve been trying to lose weight right along.  I was trying to be good and not order anything that was fattening or bad, but I wanted something.  So I thought, “Well, I’ll order one of those citrus fruit cups because that won’t hurt me.”  The waitress came and I gave her my order.  When I looked at my daughter-in-law, she had a really weird expression on her face.  I asked, “What’s the matter?”  She replied, “I thought you wanted a fruit cup!”  I said, “I did.”  She answered, “Then why did you order chocolate pudding?”   My subconscious wanted chocolate pudding!  It got right by me!  I did not even hear myself order chocolate pudding!  I’ve got the sneakiest subconscious going. It wanted chocolate pudding, so it ordered chocolate pudding.  It went right by my conscious mind, and my conscious mind didn’t even hear it.  My subconscious liked chocolate pudding a lot better than a fruit cup, so it decided to order some.  My daughter-in-law looked at me as though I had grown another head.  It really confused her. She thinks I’m weird anyway.

Now, do you understand how powerful your subconscious is?  It reacts.  If I were to sit right here and with warning scream the word “fire” and mean it, you’d all be on the outside looking in.  None of you would have made a conscious decision to leave the room.  Your programming is that when someone says the word “fire”, get out!  Get thee on the other side of the door, and then figure out what you’re doing.  There’d be a big block – a big cork – by the door – but not one of you would have thought.  You would have reacted, because that’s what’s in your computer.  You need to think about that.

Think about all the reactions you have on an everyday level, what’s already in there. And were they right?  Your parents, your family, gave you your belief system.  Have you ever thought about what you really believe in?  Ask your subconscious if it believes in God.  Because if your subconscious does not understand what something is, how can it believe in it?  The only “God” it’s got in there is what your parents gave you, and it doesn’t know what you’re talking about.  You may discover that your subconscious doesn’t believe in God.  It doesn’t know what God is, so how can it believe in something it doesn’t even know?

When you’re dealing with your subconscious, you deal with it on the level of an eight-year-old child.  Now, that doesn’t mean you talk down to it or be condescending, or anything else.  It runs your life.  When you do it you start saying to yourself, “Oh, I’ve got some erroneous programs in there.  I think I’d better start dealing with them.”  Your subconscious might say, “Oh, yeah, I don’t believe you.  You’ve never been interested before, why should you be interested now?”  You’re going to have to convince your subconscious that you’re serious.  You’re going to have to say, “Now, look, we may have been doing this for forty years, but we’re not going to do this anymore!  This is bad, wrong, it’s hurting us.  Somebody screwed up thirty or forty years ago, and it’s gone wrong, and I want it stopped!”  And then you say, “This is the way we’re going to do it now.”  But you have to stay very simple, stay on an eight-year-old level.  Don’t be theatrical or abstract.  You stay basic, and remember that you’ve got to repeat it.  Whatever’s in there is really embedded, and you’ve got to erase the tape.  You’ve got to convince it that you’re serious.  You’ve never paid any attention to it before. It won’t know why you should start now.  So, first of all, you’ve got to convince it that you really are serious, that you are going to pay some attention to it, that you are going to do some reprogramming, and you’re willing to make the reprogramming work.

For God’s sake, don’t start it if you don’t mean it.  If you do, you’ll have a much harder time the next time you want to do it.  You need to stop and think about what’s in there, and what you don’t want in there.  You need to start watching your reactions.   Start thinking about it.  You’ve got an awful lot of garbage in there, things that went in when you weren’t paying any attention, when your doorkeeper was asleep, or was doing something else, or just daydreaming.

How many times have you been in a room and participated in a conversation and can remember what someone else said over there that you weren’t paying attention to?  “Didn’t so-and-so say that they were going to leave on Thursday?”  You weren’t ever part of the conversation.  The subconscious takes in everything, and it has no discrimination.  It’s not supposed to be the discriminating factor. It’s just the memory bank.  The conscious mind is supposed to be the doorkeeper.

QUESTION:  Does this have to be done yourself, or can you reprogram people while they’re sleeping?

MARILYN:  You can reprogram people while they’re sleeping.  I did that with my son when he was a kid. I would swear he was not going to make it.  I pulled that kid out from under the wheels of cars more times!  I punished him, I put him in the house for two weeks.  He’d bolt out that door as soon as I said restriction was off, and run right in front of a car.  He was constantly getting hurt. He was a walking disaster.   I never knew when he was going to come in bloody, or broken, or whatever. I just hoped he wasn’t going to come in dead.  I got into Science of Mind and I started to realize what was possible. I sat by his bed when he was asleep and I said, “You pay attention to what you’re doing.  You look at things before you jump into them.”  I started to make all of these statements to break down this accident-proneness.  I did that for about six months and he was free from accidents nine years before he started in again.  He has a latent talent for being accident-prone.  He was about seventeen when he started again with this pattern of accident-proneness.  Then I told him, “You’re smart enough to do it for yourself now.”

QUESTION:  Was he aware of what you were doing?

MARILYN:  No.  It wasn’t necessary for him to be aware.  He was very young.  It took me about six months and all the accidents were gone, and he stayed pretty well clear for about nine years.  Then he started to have them again, and I said, “Pay attention to what you’re doing.  You know how to do it yourself, and there’s no reason to accept this for yourself.”  He can do it himself.  It’s not that I won’t do it for him, but if he’s capable of doing it for himself, he should.

QUESTION:  Do you think it’s right to pull something like that with an adult?

MARILYN:  You have to respect other people’s “thing”.  What about a child who bed wets?  What’s wrong with telling him psychologically, “You are loved. You are cared for.  You do wake up when it’s time to use the bathroom.  You have no problem with it.”  Bed wetting is very damaging psychologically to a child.  A child is very embarrassed when he / she wets the bed.  They’re very concerned about it. They don’t want their friends to know.  That’s very hard on a child.  What’s wrong with using something like that in a very positive way?

When we’re dealing with adults… all right, I’ll use an example.  Bart, you don’t mind my using you for an example?  I don’t think we have the right to intrude on Bart without Bart’s permission – he’s old enough (Bart is 14).

BART:  Okay.

MARILYN:  Okay.  My feeling would be, when I’m dealing with a little child who doesn’t know how to help himself with bed wetting or accident-proneness, or whatever the problem is (the trauma), I’m going to make the choice for him.  I’ll do it because I know it to be a positive thing in his behalf.  When I come to someone like Bart’s age, who is old enough to use his own individual reasoning capacity, I will discuss with him what I intend before I do it.  I have no right to intrude on him as an individual.  I think he has the right to some choices in his life.  If I say to him, “Bart, you know this accident thing that you have all the time, I can help you with that.  Do you mind if I try?”  Then Bart has the right to say yes or no. I think that people have the right to determine what they want in their own life.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with my sending thoughts of well-being and love to a person; I’m not intruding on his rights.  I’m just surrounding him with as positive an atmosphere as I know how to do.

Let’s just say you’re having a problem with a relationship.  The person is sleeping alongside of you every night.  You have the right to try to enhance the relationship, because you’re a participant in it.  You don’t have the right to program over someone else’s rights.  So, I would say you could lie there alongside of this person and say, “Our relationship is beautiful.  It is mutually rewarding. It is very satisfying.  It is very positive for both of us.  It is filled with love and we are growing in this relationship.”  All statements that cannot hurt that individual.  But to lie there and say, “You will love and obey me and do everything I say,” to program him that way, no, I don’t think that’s right.

QUESTION:  You could then program a positive thought.

MARILYN:  Right.  Positive, but not intruding on the rights of another human being.  You have to be responsible for your actions.  If your actions are against the best good of another individual, regardless of what it gets you on this level.  You may get some points on this level, but, boy, are you going to pay for it!  It’s not worth it.  You  must be totally responsible for what you do.  And I’ll tell you something right now. When you turn the corner in your mind, you’ll become more consciously responsible.  It doesn’t get easier, it gets tougher.

There are a couple of things I want to talk to you about  programming before I run out of time.  One of the things I did not learn to do early enough and really got stung, is one of the things I insist on people recognizing in programming.  There are two things that you do not do:  1) You do not erase your memory without putting something in that’s positive.  You do not ever leave a “hole”.  Do not erase your “tape” and leave a blank spot.  You always put in something that is positive on that blank spot.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and it can’t stand a blank spot. It will fill it with something.  You’re better off if you know what that blank is being filled in with.  You can make some conscious choice and selection.  If you’re going to take off an accident-prone program, you’re going to put in a sense of well-being, a sense of increased awareness, more perception, looking before leaping.  You’re going to take out the negative and put in a positive.  Don’t leave a hole.  Remember – if you leave a hole, something else will slide itself in there.

You’re going to remember that all it takes to make a habit in your memory is three times.  We only have to do something three times in a row and then we will accept it as a habit.  That means that if you’re going to get out of bed at three o’clock and get ice cream, do it only for two nights. Don’t do it the third night, because at three o’clock in the morning your subconscious will wake you up for ice cream.  “Oh, ice cream time!”  Your subconscious knows when it’s three o’clock.

So you say to yourself, “Whoops, look what I’m doing!”  You know how you let your children come into bed with you if they don’t feel good?   The next night, “Gee, Mommy (or Daddy) felt warm.  I think I’ll go get in bed with Mommy again.”  The kid’s not sick, but “Mommy feels warm, so I’ll go crawl in bed with Mommy.”  If Mommy’s smart, she won’t let the kid do it the third night, because then she’s got a real problem.  It’s harder to break a habit than it is to start one.  Remember it only takes three consistent tries.  Stop and think about what you’re doing.

2)  This is the one that really caught me off base and did a heck of a job on my life in 1973.  Don’t program over garbage.  Don’t take a positive statement and program it right over the top of the garbage that’s already in there.  You can do that to alleviate a symptom, but remember what you’re doing.  Get to the garbage. Figure out where the garbage is and start working on it.  What I was taught was to do all positive programming regardless of what was in there.  Whitewash it.  What happens if you throw a coat of whitewash over garbage?  It’s still garbage.  It’s going to stink.  It gets worse.  Now it’s going to ferment and reek!  If you have a lot of explosive situations in yourself, which you’re programmed for, and you slap a coat of whitewash over it, sooner or later the explosive situation is going to come tumbling out.  If you’re “lucky” like I was, you’re going to get them all in one month.  That’s what I did. I blew my whole world up in one month!  I had been three years programming and when it blew, it really blew!  About took me and my whole family with it!  What you need to recognize is that it’s all right for you to use a piece of programming, to start a new sequence in motion. That’s positive!  But don’t forget that you want to get rid of the crap.  You want to examine it, pull it out, and put the good stuff in, but not over the top of the old stuff.  We want to see if we can find some of that old stuff and start pulling it out.  Always to the best of your ability. You won’t always do it successfully every time.  Don’t worry about it. You’ll learn how.

I would say to my subconscious, “Uh oh, look what we’ve got in there now!  Let’s get a hold of that thing and let’s get it yanked out.”  See, I was taught that you could not make a negative statement.  I don’t believe that anymore.  I don’t believe you should program with a negative statement. Not that.  How can you lie to your subconscious?  It already knows.  Why would I lie to it?  It knows I’m lying to it.  What am I accomplishing?  My right toe hurts. My subconscious knows my right toe hurts!  Now, I don’t have to accept that as a continuing thing.  I can say, “Oh, no, I’m not going to accept that.”  But for me to say, “It doesn’t hurt, it never hurt, it’s not there” is silly because my subconscious knows it hurts like heck.  That doesn’t mean that it has to continue to hurt.

Examples are the easiest way to show this.  I can mostly heal myself from things like burns and cuts because I’ve been rather a klutzy person, always in a hurry.  Therefore, I’m not always paying attention to what I’m doing.  I can do all sorts of dumb things, like sticking my hands in something hot, or grabbing hold of the edge of the pan instead of the handle, or trying to whack off the end of my finger with a knife.  You don’t have to accept that for yourself, in terms of it being a continuing program.  I’ll give you a couple of examples so you can see it working.

I was at a girlfriend’s house one night and we were cooking chicken.  We were going to put it on the grill.  You know how long chicken takes on a grill. By the time you get it done, it looks like a little cinder and it’s not even edible.  What we did was parboil it for about twenty minutes and then we were going to put it on the grill.  Well, I took the chicken out of the water and I put the chicken on a plate for her to put on the grill.  Then I picked up the pan and dumped it in the sink.  Then I set the pan down, turned around to grab something and put my hand in the sink and plunged my hand into the boiling hot chicken broth.  This was like thirty seconds from boiling.  The way it went in, I stuck two fingers into a cup that contained all this hot chicken broth.  They got beet red instantly.  Talk about pain.  I thought I would go bananas!  I turned on the cold-water faucet and I shoved my fingers under it, and I said, “There is no trauma, there is no problem. My skin is perfect!”  I just started right on it, just over the top of it.  I mean, I knew it hurt.  I was going through the pain!  I was well aware of the fact that it was hurting.  I was just determined that I was not going to accept it.

Then my girlfriend came in and said, “Marilyn, you have to pick up the kids.”  I couldn’t stand there and continue to work on it.  I had to go pick up the kids from the baseball field.  So I turned on my car’s air conditioner and stuck my hand in front of it.  I drove with one hand, and I programmed on the burn the whole time I went to the ballfield and back.  By the time I got back, which was fifteen to twenty minutes after I got burned, it was totally gone. There was nothing left of it.  There was no redness, there was no soreness, there was no pain.  My subconscious reacted by being burned.  It’s used to reacting.  If you stick your fingers in boiling hot chicken broth, they’re going to get burned.  So my subconscious reacted by getting me burned, but my conscious said, “No!  We’re not willing to accept that anymore.  This is the way it is!”  I just kept on it, and kept on it, and kept on it.

I’ve got two examples that are even more dramatic.  Three, actually, but I don’t have time to tell them all.  My son was a cook – my oldest son.  He cooked in Sambo’s Restaurants as a short-order cook, going ninety miles an hour!  Reached for something and stuck his hand in the deep-fat fryer.  350°+ –  his entire hand, up to his wrist.  He yanked his hand out of the deep-fat fryer, shoved his hand into some ice.  He started programming right over the top of the pain saying, “There is no trauma, there is no pain, there is no problem.”  He kept his hand in the ice.  A waitress said, “OHHHH!”  He said, “I’m fine, there is nothing wrong, everything is perfect!”  He took his hand out of the ice – and nothing.  350° will take the skin right off your hands.  He was about sixteen years old when he did that.

COMMENT:  I remember my Grandmother.  When she used to hard boil eggs, she never used a spoon or anything to take them out.  She used to reach her hand right into the boiling water like it was nothing!  And she didn’t even get burned.

QUESTION:  Is that because the subconscious is in control?

MARILYN:  Your subconscious reacts, but you stick your hand in a 350° hot fat Fryolater, you’re going to get burned!  Your subconscious has been told that you definitely are going to lose all the skin on your hand. It’s going to be really bad.  It knows it’s really going to be bad, so your subconscious reacts by blistering.  But your conscious says, “Wait a minute.  Whoa, back up.  This does not have to be accepted!”

My youngest son – they all started in Sambo’s Restaurants – so that’s where the story is.  Do you know what a dish machine is?  It’s where they do all of the dishes, and it goes through a power spray of antiseptic hot water.  It’s over 200°. It’s incredibly hot.  It has to be antiseptic in order to pass the Health Inspections.  He went to pour a bucket of hot water from the dish machine, and the hose broke.  The hose came after his face and he backed up to get out of it.  What it did was it hit the front of both of his legs from his knees down, and he was wearing boots.  That meant that not only did the hot water go down his legs, but it got held against his legs as he had his pants tucked into his boots.  He was about fifteen or sixteen, I guess.  The water was going all over the place.  Well, he got out of the way, and he stripped off his boots, and started working on the burns as soon as possible.  The restaurant called me and told me they were taking him to the hospital because he had started to blister and everything.  He couldn’t get the boots off that fast, by the time he got out of the way.  By the time I got to him, it was close to an hour after the accident occurred.  I started working on him immediately.  He did blister, and he was told that he had third degree burns. It was really bad.  The doctor told him it would take three months for the scabs to form and fall off.  He never took a pain pill. He took nothing.  We just did healing work on him. We worked on his legs.  He went back to the doctor to take off the bandages, and at the end of eleven days, he had absolutely no scabs, no scar tissue, and he had not taken an aspirin or anything else.  Now that one took us a little longer because the hot water had been pressed against him and there was a short span of time between getting burned and when he was able to do something about it.  The doctor absolutely couldn’t believe it, because it healed something like twelve to fifteen times faster than it was supposed to!

In 1975, I moved up to Boca Raton for a year.  While I was in Boca, a lady that I knew from my Astrology Association called.  Her son was on a motorcycle and went down on the motorcycle and severed his leg.  He was 21 years old.  Severed his leg, 21 years old, his leg was just laid open in front of him.  It was almost totally severed, there was so much damage that they knew they had to complete the amputation.  He was in such a bad state at that time that they just threw a bunch of antibiotics on the wound, covered it over, figuring “get him out of shock and then we’ll continue and do the amputation.”  His Mother started hunting for me and found me in Boca.  I got in my car and drove to Hollywood.  All the way down in the car, I was asking God for help, because I knew this was going to be a difficult one.  I was asking for more energy, more power to be used through me to do the healing.   I got down to Hollywood. The young man, bless his heart, his Mother had told him that the drugs would distort what I had to do, so he didn’t take any pain killers.  He tried to give me time to get to him.  I gave him a healing and he fell asleep!  I held his hands, I just sat there and he went to sleep!  Then I proceeded to get sicker than heck.  I really did a good one on myself that time.  I ended up with my head between my knees, I thought I was going to pass out.  I broke out in a cold sweat.  I mean, that was a heavy, heavy-duty healing, not one that I would normally have to do.  I really took a dose off of that one, but it was okay.  I figured “at least he must have gotten a good dose” from my reaction.  I left and called the next day.  They opened him up to go ahead to complete the amputation, and the doctor said that the only way that his leg could have been any better was if he hadn’t done it in the first place!  He left the hospital within a month and still has his leg.

I can’t pretend to say I know or understand what happened.  I just know that when we place our minds in a positive framework, when we start refusing to accept the programming and the negative education that we’ve gotten from the time we were born, we start recognizing our own potential as creative human beings.  We can do a lot with our lives.  We do not have to accept all the negatives that occur in our lives. 

My children are all healers. My youngest one’s sixteen, my oldest one is twenty-three.  All of them are healers.  They do other psychic things, too, but not that much, actively.  You know, kids are not into their friends looking at them and thinking they’re weird.  My youngest daughter does not want anyone to know that I am a Minister.  I could see someone not wanting anyone to know I was a hooker, but a minister is not a bad trade.  She says, “Men are ministers.”   And I say, “That’s nothing but conditioning.”  She’s not into anything being done out here externally, but she’s perfectly capable of giving a healing.  She’s just a lot quieter, a lot more backed off about it.  She has to do it in the way she’s comfortable with.

I listened to her say to a little friend (she was about eight years old at the time, and it broke me up), “You’d better stop talking like that, you’re talking very negatively, and you’re going to attract that problem to you if you keep talking about it!”  I cracked up. If you can get them that young, you can start in and start building some good positive statements into them, and let them know their potential.  Let them know!  They’re gods in the making!  Every one of you in this room and every other person who exists is a god in embryo.  It’s happening. It’s beginning.  The more we exercise our creativity, the more we recognize our oneness with Life, and the more we start exercising that, start developing the divinity that we have within us, we can get better, and better, and better.  And we can start then when we’re real, real young.  Think of the dynamite type of world that we could produce if we could just start where we are.  You’ve got a ten-year-old child?  Start at ten.  My youngest was six when I got her started, my oldest one was twelve.  Start teaching them their potential.  Start showing them that they don’t have to accept all this negativity.  But start with yourself!  You don’t have to put up with the crap you’ve put up with your whole life!  You’re worth more than that!  And you can do something about it. You don’t have to accept it for yourself.

Any questions?  I think the class just ended, because my head went “Cheeooo” and shut down.  Do you understand why the subject is education? 

You already know everything that you have to know to exist.  All someone has to do is help you remember it.  The word “education” comes from the Latin word “educare”, which means “to draw forth”.  So when someone is teaching you something, he’s not teaching you anything new you don’t already know.  He’s helping you to remember something which you already know.

QUESTION:  You talked about babies coming in from Spirit.  Is it possible that some of the fears and anxieties that you have in this life may not be from your own parents in this life, but could it go back to previous lives and be programming that you still come in with?

MARILYN:  Sure.  If you stop and think about the fact that you are a consciousness, you have had experiences on many levels.  You are responsible for everything that you have initiated.  What you’re dealing with may be a sort of carry-over memory.  Not everyone believes in reincarnation.  I don’t think you have to.  The theory of reincarnation states that you have multiple physical lives.  Now, I personally am comfortable with it. I started off by not believing at all in it, and wound up by saying, “Yes, it makes sense.”  But I don’t think you have to believe in it.  You are capable of having experiences on many levels, and you are responsible for all those experiences.  What you set in  motion belongs to you. You own it.  You set something good in motion, you own the results of something good.  If you set something negative in motion, you’ll own the results of something negative.  It’s going to catch up with you in that experience or some experience in the future.  I don’t know how you determine that, but you’re responsible for all of it.  All you can do is say to yourself, “I have to recognize the things that occur to me, get as much positive mileage out of them as I can, either as a learning experience, or learning to deal with negativity and turning it into positivity.”  Then you start setting in motion some positive experiences for yourself.  I don’t know how long it will take me to catch up with all the things I’ve experienced, but I’ll tell you one thing I won’t do.

My very good friend, Barbara, about three years ago, looked upward and said, “I’m ready to pay back all my Karma now!”  I do not believe what happened to that woman in one month!  You could not conceivably believe what descended on that woman!  On September 28th, she was on her knees on the floor saying, “I can’t handle it!  I’m sorry I asked.  Take it back!”  But I saw a very, very intelligent, very aware lady reduced almost to a gibbering idiot.  Just the most incredibly bad things occurred.  I couldn’t believe it!

BARBARA:  My house cracked in half, my garage door fell off, my son was in an accident, I was in an accident.

MARILYN:  Yes, she had three accidents.  She was burned all down the front of herself, she set her kitchen on fire, and when she went to use the fire extinguisher, she inhaled the fire extinguisher fumes and ended up in the hospital.  It was like a series of disasters.

You have no idea what the state of balance is.  Don’t tamper with it.  Just do the best you can with it.  Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, just do the best you can.  And don’t hassle yourse1f.  You can’t go anywhere else, because there’s no place else to go.  You’re all going to go back to God anyway.  You never left.  So, you don’t want to do unnecessary things to yourself.  But don’t go through the torment of the damned if you decided to have a cigarette when you told everybody you gave up smoking!  God’s not going to get you!

Any other questions?

QUESTION:  Does your subconscious make you pay back everything that you do?

MARILYN:  Your subconscious merely reacts.  What you want to just say is, “I have learned the lesson that this thing was to teach me.  I accept the lesson. I have learned it.  It is a positive part of my experience.”

QUESTION:  You say you can reprogram yourself with tapes.  You did it?

MARILYN:  I didn’t do it with tapes.  I did it with thinking positive things.  But also, I’ve got a couple of tapes now alongside my bed.

QUESTION:  If you were going to start reprogramming yourself, how would you do it?  Say it out loud?

MARILYN:  My way of doing it was that I did a very strong self-examination process. That’s the way I did it.  Every one of us owns a can of worms inside.  Your can of worms is no bigger than my can of worms.  There are different worms in it, but it’s still a can of worms.  I didn’t like all the things that were down inside of me.  I started examining those things I didn’t like (like jealousy).  I started realizing that it was a very negative thing.  It had nothing to do with love and it wasn’t something I wanted to own anymore.  So I started working on that trait.  Another thing to do is to see qualities that you admire in other people and say, “I admire that quality.  I would like to incorporate that into me.”

You can get the sleep-programming tapes.  Now, Truly here just loaned me one.  I taped it for myself and I’ve been using it.  It’s interesting.  One side was on “Self Confidence” and the other one on “Success”.  Before I put that thing down into my subconscious, I listened to it while I was awake.  I wanted to know what the man was saying.  He didn’t say anything I couldn’t agree with, so I used it.  Do you understand what I did?  I let the doorkeeper make the decision.  I didn’t just put on an unknown sleep programming tape.  It could say anything to me.  I don’t know what’s on that tape.  You could do it that way.  I don’t have any particular results manifesting just yet, but I’ll continue to play the tapes.  It’s fine with me.  I’m asleep.  What am I losing?  I push the button, it turns itself off when the half hour is over, and I’ve just gotten myself a little sleep programming.  They do that for teaching languages.  It really helps you, within reason!

QUESTION:  Are you saying that if you discover a defect in our memory bank, then we can erase it and replace it with a positive thing?

MARILYN:  Right!

QUESTION:  Are you saying that in order to erase it we simply say, “I see what I don’t like about myself, and I want to remove the thing, whatever it is.”  Is that sufficient to take it out?

MARILYN:  You need to get on it, and you need to stay on it.  You may have had that in there for forty years, and your subconscious is used to acting that way.  You have to convince your subconscious that you don’t want to act that way anymore.  You can say, “I can see where that fault is. We’ve got to get rid of that!”  You need to look at it and you need to convince your subconscious that you mean it!  Sometimes you can really be horrified when you see something in yourself that you just don’t like.  You may have to do it only once that time, because you make such an impact on your subconscious with your emotional reaction that you don’t have to do it more than once.  When you’re doing a purely intellectual process, sometimes you have to get in there and reinforce it.  Then you have to say, “Jealousy is not a good trait. It’s not a trait I wish to participate in.  I recognize that we’ve done it before, but there’s no reason that we have to do it anymore!”

QUESTION:  What about those things that are in conflict between your subconscious and your conscious minds?

MARILYN:  Your subconscious will win.  You’ve got to keep repeating.  You’ve got to recognize that it’s a very old habit, that it will perpetuate itself out of habit, and that your subconscious does not reason.  It doesn’t know how to tell the difference between a good habit and a bad habit.  That’s the function of your conscious mind.  It will just perpetuate whatever’s in your programming.  You’ve got to put in something stronger than that, and that may take you a little effort.  You don’t let down on it and you don’t lie to your subconscious, because your subconscious knows what’s in it.

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