Soular Power - Unlocking the Eight Gates to Joy and Abundance

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Introduction

I wrote this book originally for myself, as a reminder of all the tools that have consistently helped me learn to take back my true power, the power of my soul. I like to think of them as POWER TOOLS for the soul. Funny that I would use the power tool metaphor considering I’m clueless when it comes to power tools. My dad was an accountant, not that that means he wouldn’t know how to use power tools (but of course, he didn’t, sorry Dad!). He had a chest of tools down in the basement that were piled one on top of the other. It was always impossible to find what you were looking for. The power tools had mostly rusted out by the time I had the inclination to use them. So we just never seemed to have the right tool for the job at hand, kind of like my own spiritual journey-looking for the right set of tools but never being able to find them.

I am a complex guy who experienced years of joy and frustration, of triumphs and what I perceived as defeats. I’d experience intermittent successes personally and professionally and then coast along without building on my past successes, watching others live the life I knew I could have. And yet, throughout the many dark nights of the soul, I knew that I was a survivor. I knew that my sense of humor, my creativity, my capacity for love (and of course, my ability to do a great squirrel impression) would guide me if I let them.

I diligently studied eastern philosophy, psychology, and mysticism. I learned about the soul and I experienced moments when my creativity and passion were boundless, as infinite as the sea. I’d experience waves of unconditional love for others and a deep connection to everyone and everything (and yes, this was all drug free!). That connection to my soul was palpable but fleeting. I didn’t know how to sustain a life of joy. I studied all of the spiritual principles and yet something was missing. I knew that there must be a way to consistently feel connected to a place of infinite joy. I began to study with a man named Bob Stern who shared insights about yet another esoteric book on Jewish meditation, The Kuntris Hispaalus. I soon understood what I’d been missing. Coupled with my own new discoveries and the ongoing teachings of Joseph Saltoun, I was able to piece together a personal step-by-step program (a spiritual toolbox, as it were, and a well-organized one to boot) to feeling incredibly empowered and connected to the power of my soul, what I call my soular power. It’s this program or simple series of eight gates that I feel honored to share with you. There are eight gates, which we will unlock together. Within each gate are meditations and Power Tools for the soul, which will help you open the next gate and, once learned, can be used anytime to help you become consistently soular powered.

The eight gates are:

GATE # 1 -   Awareness - Learning what drives your behavior

GATE # 2 -   Reclaiming ‘God’ as your infinite source of Joy, Love, Expansion and Abundance

GATE # 3 -   The Principle of Expansion - Thinking and Speaking like your Soul

GATE # 4 -   Protecting your Ego - Ego Home Security System

GATE # 5 -   Seeing the Good in Yourself and Others - Developing Your Soular Vision

GATE # 6 -   The True Secret to Getting Your Prayers Answered

  - The Power of Gratitude Statements

GATE # 7 -   The Lost Art of Blessing

GATE # 8 -   Trusting Your Divine Instincts and Living in a Soular Powered World

What has opened the gates for me is to focus consistently on my newfound awareness and to practice the steps daily until they become new habits and I urge you to do the same. I finally feel connected to the power of my own soul and have joyously embarked on an exciting new journey. I welcome you to begin this journey with me.

Know that, no matter where you are in your life, what you’ve done or what you’ve been through, by choosing to embrace the power of your soul you can manifest your divine destiny. Embrace your soular power. Appreciate it, develop it and you will regain faith in yourself as a divine being. Think of this as a book of skillosophy (skill + philosophy) in which you will not only be introduced to wisdom and inspiring ideas but you will learn the skill set to implement the ideas as well.

The Three Keys

In order to begin the process of unlocking the eight gates, imagine that there are 3 locks on the first gate for which we need three keys. What are the keys?

The First Key

Everything is consciousness. The key to changing your life, the key to joy and abundance at all levels begins with consciousness. How you think and feel determines the quality of your life.

The Second Key

Nothing is accomplished by blaming others or yourself. You cannot begin to open the gates unless you are willing to let go of blame once and for all. Choose to let go of all blame and begin again. Start here and now. From this new point you can begin to decide what kind of life you want and can begin the journey through the eight gates with a fresh perspective.

The Third Key

As we’ll discover in gate number one, you are the creator of your own world (or if you choose, the co-creator with the divine). Through your own consciousness you have knowingly or unwittingly created your own world. If you don’t like aspects of the world you have created, then you have the power to change your world by releasing blame and changing your consciousness.

GATE ONE

Awareness and learning what drives your behavior

Welcome to gate one in your joyous journey towards becoming soular powered in all areas of your life. All transformation begins with awareness-taking the time to become aware of what’s going on inside you, thinking about what’s driving your behavior. For most of us, we’ve become so harried just trying to get through the day that we’ve lost the innate ‘awareness’ with which we were born. If you’re like me, you’ve probably thought to yourself, Why does my life sometimes feel like I’m on auto pilot and things don’t change regardless of my efforts? Most of us grew up as kids being reactors since we didn’t have the ability to make many of our own decisions. Things happened and we reacted.

I remember watching reruns of a TV show called Perry Mason, a courtroom whodunit drama, with my older brother. Within the first 10 minutes of the show, my brother would get a big grin on his face and announce who did it and he was invariably right all the time. I remember getting so annoyed because I wanted to get swept away in the drama of the story and enjoy finding out at the end who did it. As we got older, we’d watch similar shows and, sometimes, just to annoy me more, within 60 seconds, yes, while the credits were still rolling, my brother would correctly announce who the killer was! No big surprise that my brother became a very successful criminal lawyer. My point is that, because I was used to reacting to circumstances, I enjoyed being swept up in the drama of the TV show or movie I was watching. Well, what happens when it’s the TV show or movie of your own life?

That’s when we all seem to become so caught up in the movie that we forget it’s a movie in the first place. We’re bombarded by external circumstances and the media, suffocating in an endless barrage of conflicting information and we’re desperately trying to catch our collective breath.

So what do we do? We react. We evaluate our options and forge ahead. We encounter yet another obstacle and what do we do? We react again. When we lack awareness we are assuming that we don’t have access to the remote control (I mean, talk about a ‘Universal’ remote) to perhaps change the movie or TV show of our life. We assume that someone else has the remote, someone ‘out there’, or maybe we assume that God has exclusive control. But either way, we assume that we can’t change the channel. Awareness gives you the ability to step back, to step out of the movie of your life and realize that there is a remote and that, yes, you have full access to it and always have had. We’ve forgotten that we’re here to create our own world, not to react to a world created for us by others. Our purpose is to create our own world. Your purpose is to joyously create your own world.

Perhaps you’re thinking, But I’ve tried. How can one person fight against multinational corporations, a global recession, prejudice, intolerance, evil, injustice, abusive family members, a bad hair day, etc.? You’re correct. One person using his/her ego power can’t overcome personal or global adversity. Using ego power you may barely survive day to day. But love can heal everything. When you tap into your soular power, your own infinite source of love, joy and expansion, you can and will create miracles every day. Your individual personal soular power is infinitely superior to the ego power of thousands of other people combined.

So how do we begin to joyously regain possession of the spiritual remote control? By recognizing that at any one point in time we are engaged in one of two operating systems that determine the quality of our lives and how we react at any given moment.

LEARNING WHAT DRIVES YOUR BEHAVIOR – EGO vs. SOUL

EGO VS. SOUL - Understanding the two underlying operating systems that drive your behavior.

Take a moment to remember a time when you felt free, connected and ‘in the flow’. Was it a time when you were a child playing with abandon? Perhaps it was a moment of intimacy with a loved one or friend, or was it when you were playing a sport or engaged in some creative activity?

In these moments time seems to stand still and you feel present, engaged and alive. Now take another moment to remember a time when you felt anxious, frustrated, victimized, threatened, scared, or angry. Perhaps it was a time when you didn’t get the love you wanted as a child, or maybe when you were desperately trying to figure out how to pay your bills or simply a time when someone said something and it hurt your feelings. And what about those times when someone says something and it rolls off your back and you just laugh? Or when someone says the same thing at a different time and you get angry or deeply hurt?

I remember a summer when I listened to a tape of affirmations or positive statements. (That’s dating me right there. mean, who listens to cassette tapes anymore?) The only affirmation from that tape that stayed with me throughout my life has been, It’s not what happens to me, it’s how I respond to what happens to me that determines the quality of my life. What has always fascinated me is what determines how and why we react in a particular way at any given time. Is it just your mood at the time or is it something deeper? What is it that motivates your feelings and your moment-to-moment reactions?

From years of research and meditation, I’ve come to believe that we are born with two very distinct operating systems, our ego and our soul. How we react in any given circumstance depends on which operating system we’re in at the time.

If you can learn to identify each system and, more importantly, learn to switch from ego to soul (develop your own personal ego-soul on-off switch), then you have the key to joy and abundance and you can begin to recreate your world and effectively change your life and the lives of others.

EGO DRIVE

Our ego is our default operating system; default meaning that, unless we consciously choose otherwise, that’s the system we’re stuck in. That’s the system that most of us are trapped in unconsciously and have been for most of our lives. So what exactly is our ego system?

It is a drive or desire based on fear, lack and limitation, the drive for self-preservation. In order to understand the intensity of the ego drive, imagine you’re a soldier at war. You’re alone in the jungle or tropical rainforest and you’re trying to escape to safety. You’re anxious, desperate to survive. Your mind is always calculating how to survive at every moment and it’s warning you over and over that there’s not enough—not enough time, not enough ammunition. Even worse, your mind keeps telling you that "You’re not enough. You’ll never be enough!" You’re not fast enough, smart enough, etc.

This ego drive infuses every aspect of your life from early childhood. If you’re subconsciously getting the message that you’re not enough, then you turn to outside sources to make you feel like you are enough. For most of us this is where the endless search for outside love and approval begins. You turn to your parents; siblings, friends and teachers to feed this endless hunger to feel like you are enough. Unfortunately, because it is subconscious it is all pervasive. As you get older you search for lovers or partners who will make you feel like you’re enough. You may choose a profession not because it reflects your true passion but because it’s a path to financial security. If you make a lot of money then people will think you’re important and you will feel loved. Even if you do make a choice based on what will make you happy, for most of us what we think will make us happy is still based on a way to secure outside love and approval. The bottom line is that as long as you are in ego drive you never will be truly happy, because whatever you have will never feel like it is enough and you won’t feel lasting contentment. There is always that fear that you may lose what you have: your lover, your money, your possessions, your talent, your status, your friends, etc. This fear of not being loved leads so many of us to become either caretakers/people pleasers or manipulators or a combination.

But isn’t fear a good motivator? If you’re afraid you won’t have money and that fear motivates you to do well in school and accomplish things, isn’t that a good thing? What’s wrong with having a fear of failure that drives you to create a hugely successful business? The problem is that in so many cases the accomplishments come at a price, the price of spending time with your children, or a marriage that dissolves. But the price is mostly the unbelievable amount of stress that inevitably takes its toll on you both emotionally and physically. This leads to disease, disability and untimely death, which is the paradox of the ego operating system.

The paradox of the ego operating system

As explained, the ego is a fear-based drive for self-preservation based on fear, lack and limitation. It is ostensibly there to protect you but the problem is that it keeps you in fight or flight mode, causing you to worry constantly that you’re not enough and that there will never be enough. Therefore, you have to protect yourself at all times. The ego force urges you to constantly push harder, work harder and accumulate more. What happens is that this drive for self-preservation puts so much stress on your mind and body that it actually causes you to die prematurely. It wears down your immune system, causes you to get sick and ultimately kills you. What is there to protect and preserve your life ends up doing exactly the opposite. It ends up killing you years before your time. Fortunately, we each have another operating system, that of the soul.

SOUL

Your soul operating system or soular system is one that we have to choose consciously. It is the opposite of the ego system, which is based on fear, lack and limitation. Your soul operating system is a drive or desire based on infinite joy, unconditional love and expansion (and connection).

At any given moment of time your soul feels contentment. When you are in your soular operating system the message you receive is that wherever you are and whatever you have is enough. Because your soul is connected to an infinite source of joy, love and expansion, it doesn’t know or recognize lack. Your soul just knows that every moment is enough and that you are enough. Since you feel like you are enough and are not in constant ‘worry’ mode, there is a natural tendency toward expansion.

The paradox of the Soular Operating System

When you’re in your soular system, you feel like you’re enough at any given moment. One way to shift into your