What if I told you that everything you experience in physical reality is a reflection of who you are in each moment? That each experience, each person, each event, each object, is a projection of yours onto the screen of life, an expression designed to remind you of your incredible power as a creator?

Let’s say that each of us is a being of energy and that we each resonate or vibrate with our own unique signature vibration. These differences in vibration create our physical bodies differently, as well as our experiences, and the thoughts that we entertain, and so, you get what you vibrate! More simply, like attracts like, or, you get what you focus on. Not only are we an extension of our Whole Selves cleverly directing our focus onto the details of physical reality - but as we go about our lives we are the ones who pick the perspectives and the probabilities that we live out…by choosing what we focus on!

Now, you might say that you could definitely see where SOME things reflect who you are, like that new car that you just bought, or that apple pie you just made, or the grinning child you just tickled, but certainly not EVERYTHING… especially those things in your life that you find at least somewhat disturbing. That’s where the “becoming conscious” part fits in. If there’s a part of your life that you are not happy with, that’s probably a place where you have been creating haphazzardly and are unaware that you’re doing it. That is, you’re sending out a certain vibration without your conscious knowing - like the background music piped in at your local grocery store, or the wallpaper in your kitchen, or the air that you breathe - these objects or experiences are all a part of your life, yet you may accept them as simply a part of the WAY LIFE IS, rather than a reflection of your personal symbology or vibration. One way to get a handle on this concept is to start looking at your life and the events you experience as you would interpret a nighttime dream. You’ll never look at your shoes or your annoying coworker the same way again!

I remember the first time I became conscious of an assumption I’d made about “how life was.” I was about 13 years old and had gone to a friend’s house to stay the night. When they pulled out the extra bed and her mother made it for me, she put it together without a top sheet - just a bottom sheet, a blanket, and a pillow. I remember wondering if I should tell her that she forgot it, until I saw that my friend’s bed was made the same way. This is a funny but important example - it wasn’t until I met with this contrasting experience that I began to see the actual framework of beliefs (vibrations) in which I grew up. I was suddenly aware of the song being played in the background - I now saw the wallpaper, or at least peeked under the corner of it - as if for the first time. Talk about opening Pandora’s box!

So, how then was the fact that my bed at home was made with a top sheet a reflection of who I was or what I was vibrating? That’s where our feelings about what we experience come into play. Contrasting experiences also allow us to see our own emotional reactions more clearly. Now, what if I told you that “feeling bad” about something is not just a part of how life is, but a call to pay attention because what you’re choosing to focus on and experience in that moment is not aligned with who you really are? And, what if I told you that “feeling good” is not just a part of how life is, but a call to pay attention because what you’re choosing IS aligned with who you are?

We feel good when our vibrations are aligned with what we’re experiencing. But we feel BAD not just when our vibrations are NOT aligned with what we’re experiencing, but when we alter our own vibration to match the discordant vibration of what we’re experiencing. In essence, instead of being the director and setting our OWN tone to create in joy and alignment, we’ve become reactive to things and events we perceive OUT THERE. The ironic part is that we’re the ones that created the experiences in the first place and just seem to have forgotten - and so we perpetuate the loop of projection and reaction until we decide to jump out of the cycle. At that point, we stop identifying ourselves with all the “stuff” out there and come back to our own centers, where it all starts.

The process of becoming aware of what we’ve been creating and then learning to consciously alter our own beliefs (vibrations) to create what we WANT can be one of the more challenging and psychological tasks of our time. And yet, isn’t that exactly what we came here to do in this time of awakening? We’re given prophecies of doom and dramatic situations to help shake us up and make us ask, “Isn’t there something ELSE? Something BETTER? What are my other choices beyond FEAR?”

The more we let go of our habitual stance of focusing on fear as reality and instead look to love and joy and connectedness, the more we align with our own sense of personal integrity - the more we INTEGRATE and work WITH that divine aspect of each of us. Although our unconscious lives may have created through a habitual focus in fear, our growing conscious awareness now knows it has the choice to choose love where it once defaulted to fear. And when we realize this, then we are truly free. And then, that’s how we vibrate, and how we create our new experiences in physical reality!

[Originally published in The Edge, February 1999.]

There is a famous Zen koan (philosophical riddle) which asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The student of Zen is supposed to meditate on this riddle until some degree of insight or enlightenment occurs. The tricky part is that there is no right answer. What you are, or what you know, or what you believe, is what you get.

Although no longer an active student of Zen, I was recently meditating of the riddle of one hand clapping when I got an answer that might be useful to share.

The sound of one hand clapping is the same as the sound of two hands clapping.

How could that be, you ask (for the sake of this article I am assuming that you do ask)? It’s simple, I reply. The concept of clapping implies that a sound is being produced by two surfaces coming into contact, even if only one of them is actually moving. No sound, no clapping; no second surface, no sound. Yet, the riddle definitely states that there is a sound and that there is clapping. Therefore, my answer follows logically. Yes, I know, the answer to a koan is supposed to be beyond logic, but rest assured that the answer came intuitively. The logic came after.

Before you dismiss this as simply a bit of cleverness or a waste of time, let me tell you about the rest of the meditation. After the revelation that the sound of one hand clapping must be the same as the sound of two hands clapping, it struck me that this was a nice metaphor for two of the corollaries of the Second Principle of Huna. The basic principle states that there are no limits, which implies that everything is in a relationship to everything else. And that implies that if you change one side of a relationship you change both sides. Even if only one hand changes its position relative to another, unmoving hand , a clapping sound will be produced. We don’t have to wait for both sides of a relationship to participate before bringing about beneficial change. Change one side of that relationship and the other side has to change because the relationship has changed.

We use this idea a lot in teaching Huna. For instance, in third-level healing work where we assume that everything is a dream and everything is dreaming, we say that if you change one dream you automatically change all related dreams. So you can go to an imaginary garden and make changes to symbols of your life experience, and your life experience will change. In second-level healing work where we assume that everything is telepathically linked, we say that if you begin to silently bless and forgive people with whom you are having difficulties, they will know it and they will begin to change their behavior toward you without a word being spoken. And in first level healing, where we assume that everything is separate but potentially interactive, we teach that if you smile and hug a lot you will tend to get a lot more smiles and hugs back, even from people who don’t normally smile or hug.

Now what do you think would happen if you applied this idea to the whole of your life?

In a strained personal relationship, for example, instead of waiting for the other person to make the first move toward reconciliation you could start the process in your own mind, either by purposely creating a better opinion of the other person, or by imagining the two of you getting along with all of your differences. Sorry, you can’t control with your imagination what the other person thinks or does (it simply doesn’t work), but you can use imagined persuasion just as you might in a face to face meeting. As in any form of persuasion, however, the more your persuasion is based on a benefit to the other person, the more successful it is likely to be.

In a strained global relationship, assuming our theory is valid (which means workable). we might be able to get together even in a smallish group and and rethink (or redream) our relationship with one or both countries involved. Theoretically, of course, it ought to take only one person to make a change. On the other hand, the change of one person’s relationship to a country might only produce a very small change, so the more people the better. The thing to remember, in this context, is that you are trying to change how you think or feel about the country, not trying to change the country. It’s a subtle but important difference, and it applies to people as well as countries.

If this idea catches on we can introduce a Huna koan (the actual Hawaiian phrase is “nane huna,” a hidden riddle or conundrum): “What is the sound of one person loving?”

“What about me?” is a common cry among people who feel that they have given too much of themselves to others and have neglected their own heppiness or development. Sadly enough, this cry, however heartfelt it may be, is based upon some serious misconceptions about the relationship between Self and Other.

Let’s begin with the fact that a large number of people in many different cultures have been brought up to believe that the welfare of other people is far more important than their own. The usual result of this is that such people spend a large portion of their lives - and some spend all of it - suppressing their own emotional needs and desires while trying their best to ensure that the needs and desires of others are fully satisfied. The inevitable result of this is a great deal of psychological, emotional, and even physical pain.

One reason for this is that suppressing one’s fundamental emotional needs and desires always leads to psychological, emotional, and physical disharmony of some kind or another, depending on the degree of suppression. This is because emotions are forms of energetic movement whose nature is to be expressed in thoughts, feelings, and actions. Suppressing this movement causes tension, and unrelieved tension causes disharmony. The fundamental emotional needs and desires - to feel connected and to feel effective - are energetically creative when they have an outlet, and energetically destructive when they do not.

A second reason for the pain is that one can never fully satisfy the needs and desires of others, no matter how hard one tries, because needs and desires are subjective, not objective. This means that no matter how much you do for other people, or how well you do it, they always have the option to decide that what you’ve done is not enough. This increases your feelings of disconnection and ineffectiveness and increases the pain or discomfort of your own suppression.

A third reason is simply that the whole concept of putting the welfare of others above one’s own is based on an assumption that there has to be a choice between you and them, between total selfishness and total selflessness. I wonder who made up that stupid rule. I say “stupid” because either way the result is disharmony.

Total selfishness leads to feelings of isolation and despair, and total selflessness leads to feelings of isolation and despair. It’s a lose-lose proposition. Even when the choices are less than total, for some people these pathways have a tendency to produce increasing cold-heartedness and inhumane behavior on one end, and increasing resentment and violent behavior on the other.

Remove that one assumption and it’s amazing how things can change. It’s entirely possible to take care of yourself and take care of others if you want to. You can be happy and share happiness, be rich and share the wealth, empower yourself and empower others. Amazingly, you can even discover - if you remove the above assumption - that sharing happiness increases yours, sharing wealth increases yours, and empowering others empowers you.

There is another side to the problem, however, and that is when the need for connection and effectiveness so great that one is always looking for signs that others don’t care enough. It could be a friend who doesn’t write or call often enough or when you want them to; people who don’t appreciate what you do for them in the way you want to be appreciated; strangers who don’t pay attention to you when you want to be noticed; and many other forms of behavior that seem to demonstrate that other people don’t care enough about you no matter what you do. Some people with this problem get depressed, and some get angry enough to make themselves sick.

The real problem here is that a person with this kind of need doesn’t care enough about himself or herself. This lack of self appreciation can become so great the responsibility for appreciation is thrust onto others, usually with strict rules about how they should behave so that the lack of appreciation can be monitored and quantified, thus justifying the rules. Besides the physical, emotional, and mental stress this can cause, the demand that other people behave correctly has the effect of making them want to avoid you, rather than get closer. Trying to solve the “What about me?” crisis by this method is like trying to attract flies with vinegar instead of honey. The solution, when you are ready to take responsibility for your own experience of course, is to start practicing unconditional love for yourself as far as you are able. That means starting with 10% if you can and increasing from there, with no need to ever reach a hundred. And reducing your rules for others by 10% as well.

There are still choices to make, of course. You’ll have to decide when and where and how you will express your own needs and desires, and you may have to decide when and where and how to help others fulfill theirs. Finding a harmonious flow between taking responsibility for your needs and desires while NOT taking responsibility for the needs and desires of others and still being willing to help them, may prove to be a challenge. But a challenge is not a duty, being good to yourself does not require guilt, and doing good for others without expectations on either side can become a source of joy.

First of all, you should realize, of course, that prayer is telepathic. In other words, prayer is a concentration of thought which puts your mind in contact with the object of your prayer. It is not the same as meditation. The main difference between prayer and meditation is that prayer is specifically seeking an effect, while the goal of meditation may be pure understanding or the joy of contact. Also, meditation may be undirected,while prayer never is.

In prayer we are trying to do something or to get something done, either for ourselves or for someone else. We pray to get an effect, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, or physically. Since an effect is involved, energy has to be involved, and all prayer involves the transmission of energy, either toward or away from the one who prays.

Most commonly, prayer is directed toward a spiritual being, however the individual conceives that being. This is natural and proper, but unfortunately many people get discouraged because their prayers are apparently not answered. Certainly this may be partly because they have complexes or beliefs which prevent them from making contact, but the major reason is that they are not praying for the right thing.

I am not suggesting that they were praying for things they didn’t need or for something that was contrary to the will of a spiritual being. The problem was that they were praying for that being to do something which it is not in its nature to do.

In the prayer form known as the Lord’s Prayer that is found in the Christian Bible, Jesus states that we should ask for energy (”our daily bread”), cleansing (forgiveness), and guidance. A little further on in the chapter of Luke (11), Jesus makes the famous statement about, “Ask, and it shall be given unto you….” This has been taken to mean that you can ask God for anything you like and you will get it, although in practice it obviously doesn’t work out that way. The reason is revealed only a few lines further. What is to be given is the Holy Spirit. In other words, energy, ideas, and inspiration. We find this same idea in the Old Testament, in Sufi, Hindu, and Chinese writings, as well as in Hawaiian - namely that what we receive from above is the wisdom and the power to act. But it is we who must do the acting.

This brings us to the point of fact that there are essentially two types of prayer: vertical and horizontal. By vertical prayer, I mean that which is directed toward God or the Higher Self or toward someone in spirit. From this type of prayer we can only get inspiration, knowledge, understanding, and energy. Note carefully that the guidance we may get is in the form of ideas and inspiration. We do not actually get the kind of guidance that tells us exactly what to do and how to do it. That kind of guidance implies the making of choices, and that is our sole prerogative.

Horizontal prayer is that directed toward our everyday life, either to heal or help ourselves or others, or to change the future. This type of prayer is accomplished by us, and its effectiveness is determined by our beliefs and by the amount of energy we put into it. We each create our own experience of reality, the circumstances we find ourselves in, and through prayer properly understood we can change those circumstances. But it is the individual who changes the circumstances, not God and not the High Self. From them we only get the tools; they will not do the work for us.