Nectar for Your Soul

Chapter 3.
According to your faith be it unto you…

How ignorance and fallacious conceptions divest humanity of the very potential for achieving happiness. The basic types of worldviews: religious, scientific, philosophical and skeptical. Why are skeptics doomed to be unhappy? What’s more important: faith, knowledge, or faith founded in knowledge? The eight conditions for curing ignorance. Why are many good books about the strength of positive thinking ineffective? Proof of the materiality of thoughts and the strength of the conscious: scientific facts and practical experiments. How knowledge and faith help to fulfill desires. Why the prayers of believers are not fulfilled and how one ought to pray in order to see results. The story of Pope John Paul II’s canonization. Russian academician Georgiy Sytin and his “miracle.” The falseness and hypocrisy of Lourdes.

A man does not suffer nearly as much from the events in his life as from his attitude towards them.

Michel de Montaigne,

French philosopher (1533—1592)

Earlier we mentioned the following observation of Roman Philosopher and Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “Take away your opinion, and there is taken away the complaint, […] Take away the complaint, […] and the harm is taken away.” This same thought was repeated one and a half thousand years later by Michel de Montaigne, whose words are used as the epigraph to this chapter. We could have incorporated dozens more similar sayings from noted thinkers throughout the ages, affirming the preeminence of our conscious over external conditions. This means that happiness, as a distinctive condition of the soul, is fully determined not by that which happens to us and around us, but exclusively by our attitudes towards those events. Thousands of books contain this Truth; though few read such books, as people are more interested in other things. We will here include one small but highly characteristic example of people’s interests today.

In June of 2010, Apple announced the impending release of the new iPhone 4 smartphone, and crowds of people formed huge lines ahead of time in front of stores. The press reported that a Justin Wagoner from Dallas had decided to await the beginning of sales in front of a store for an entire week. He set up a tent in front of the store and brought with him a week’s worth of food and drink as well as a folding chair and sleeping bag, and all this in order to become the first owner of the new smartphone. Earlier, one million units of Apple’s tablet computer the iPad were sold in a total of 22 days.

It’s impossible just to consider that even the wisest of philosophical books had similar success; in the value systems of millions of people a new smartphone and tablet computer rank significantly higher. Because of this millions of people, unsatisfied with their lives, try to struggle with circumstances rather than changing their worldview, despite the fact that it specifically is responsible for all their major problems.

We would do well to touch upon this question, despite the fact that we personally would really like to quickly move on to the presentation of interesting facts and revelation of the methods for obtaining happiness. But we well know that all “solid” facts and precise recipes will inevitably shatter upon one’s system of conceptions if it contains contradictions. For this reason, please exercise a little more patience and try to attentively follow the entire path of our reasoning; that way the facts and recipes can be properly understood and will bring maximum benefit.

And so, everything depends on one’s worldview, which consists of a system of firm views, principles, values and beliefs that define our attitude towards reality as well as our understanding of the world as a whole and of our place within it.

Under identical circumstances, one person will be happy, another not. It’s like in the famous parable about two travelers in the desert, dying of thirst. When they meet a man who offers them each a half glass of water, one cries out with joy, having seen a half-full glass, while the other is greatly upset, having paid attention only to the fact that the glass is half-empty.

Billions of people found themselves in a similar situation in 2008 when they were hit by the world economic crisis. The crisis hurt everyone, but people reacted to it very differently.

On January 6, 2009 in Germany, billionaire Adolf Merckle, one of the richest people in Europe, committed suicide by throwing himself under a train.

“The desperate situation of his companies, caused by the financial crisis, the uncertainties of the last few weeks and his powerlessness to act, broke the passionate family entrepreneur and he took his own life,” stated a press release distributed by the family of the deceased.

In Chicago, on February 23, 2009 another billionaire, Steven Good, CEO of the company Sheldon Good & Company Auctions International, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. His company auctioned off real estate.

These are just two examples from many instances of suicide by people who lost significant parts of their estates during the crisis. Others rejoiced at the fact that they hadn’t lost everything. The difference between the first and second is only in their belief systems regarding the significance of money in a person’s life and, ultimately, the meaning of life itself. If it consists of hoarding billions then of course their losses become serious grounds for suicide. And ignorance about what awaits those who commit suicide after death transforms those grounds into action.

When reality begins to contradict one’s personal belief system, a personality crisis occurs. For this reason it’s important to clarify when, how and by what a person’s belief system is formed.

This process starts with the parents. It is precisely from them that a child receives the first, incredibly important information about him or herself and about the surrounding world. These founding concepts and values take shape through childhood and for many people remain fundamental throughout their lives.

What defines a person’s religious identity? Only a few individuals make a conscious choice during adulthood; everyone else receives religion from their parents. The famous Russian researcher of beliefs and religions Victor Nyukhtilin writes in his book Melchizedek:

“Having examined the believers around us, we unfortunately see that more often than not each person’s faith is nothing more than automatic participation in the club of some faith on the basis of birth, locality or observance of tradition. Christians everywhere don’t know the meaning of their holidays, Muslims don’t know that Allah is that same God who is in one instance Jehovah and in another the Trinity, don’t know one line of the Koran and consider Christ the enemy of Islam, though Christ is considered by Islam to be one of the great prophets of Allah… Once, having asked some Buddhists from Kalmykia, the only Russian republic where the official faith is Buddhism, to explain the difference between the first and second turnings of the Wheel of Dharma, I was met with merry laughter: we didn’t become Buddhists to fill our heads with such nonsense. Well then what for? Adherence to a faith most often is defined from childhood and takes a form based on external characteristics involved in religious patriotism rather than a sense of God within oneself.

For this reason it makes sense for each person to ask him or herself, how well do I understand my faith and how do I live out my connection to God and not the inescapable traditions of my fathers, which I accept as an established part of my life and in my mind, but not in my heart. To what extent is my faith the state of being of my soul and not the national style of my life?

And on the other hand, shouldn’t at least a slight discomfort arise at the thought that if you were born, for example, just five hundred kilometers further south you would be a Muslim and not a Christian? And if faith had carried your parents just a little closer to the equator and a little further to the right, you would be a Buddhist. And if you were an atheist lost in a big city, addled by a nervous disorder, and on a straight path to the Jehovah’s Witnesses…

In practically every one of these situations, a person has no choice! He receives his religion, so to speak, along with his birth certificate… Religious denominations seem to have sort of divided the Earthly sphere into spheres of influence, and those born in one of these spheres immediately acquire a faith not of their choosing during childhood.

And the important thing is that many of those people have religion but don’t have Faith… “Inhereted” religion, unfortunately, doesn’t require Faith, but is limited to observation of rituals” [14].

During a person’s adolescence, the formation process of his or her worldview is influenced by teachers, friends, mass media, books, films… Some information is rejected immediately as it is received, some partially settles in, and a few parts take on the status of worldview. It is only natural that of the ocean of information found in the world a person receives only droplets and remains ignorant about the rest. And when questions arise during life, the answers to which lay beyond the bounds of one’s personal knowledge, a person inevitably makes mistakes.

In many families parents and children are in conflict with one another. Taking this into account, few know that there are many so-called “indigo children” among those born in the last two decades. Indigo children are unique people: their level of immunity is many times higher than normal and their IQs significantly exceed the average. In fact, this is a new race that is set apart from us by their very genetic code. Interacting with them requires special knowledge, the absence of which leads not only to conflict, but to tragedy; in the eyes of these children, wise beyond their years, who have come into the world already understanding many truths, normal adults appear stupid and undeserving of respect. And when these “stupid people” begin to “raise” and even punish their unusual children in an attempt to make them like everyone else, indigo children show aggression; there are marked incidents of these children’s violence against their “uncomprehending” parents.

On the Internet there are already dozens if not hundreds of sites that shed light on these uncommon children, in book stores there has appeared special literature which gives insights that are simply necessary for normal interaction with indigo children. But have many parents and teachers delved into this knowledge? Assuredly no. Our experience, from interaction with hundreds of people at seminars shows that the majority haven’t even heard of indigo children.

We already wrote a little about people’s sexual illiteracy. But the knowledge of sexual cycles, revealed by Dr. John Kappas, does little on its own for family happiness. One also needs a specific worldview regarding the basis of marriage. Many men live in a belief system in which a wife is three things in one: housekeeper, nanny, and sex machine. His role consists only of financial support and giving her presents on major holidays. Such men are then surprised – why did this previously sweet wife suddenly transform into a malicious Gorgon? And how many women act similarly to Mrs. Lincoln, of whom we spoke earlier?

Gloria Taylor Brown, president of the American Women of Wisdom Foundation, affirms:

“The shift in paradigm will require that men and women see each other as we really are. We will both have to step into who we are for the good of all concerned. If I want a positive relationship with a man, then it is necessary for me to see the good in him. We will have to support one another completely, both as individuals and as a couple.

We will have to honor the God and Goddess in one another. It’s what the Hindus are doing when they say, “Namaste” – I bow before the Divine in you. That is the way we must learn to see one another. We will have to learn to see the best in each other, to say, “The God in me honors the God in you.” And this means redefining our concepts of what constitutes a relationship.

There are many kinds of relationships. For many, sex is simply an animalistic urge to reproduce, but we can look beyond the body and simply have a spiritually based relationship” [15].

You’ll agree that this is a distinctive worldview, but it doesn’t simply fall from the sky; it can only be acquired by studying the corresponding books or attending seminars of such people as Gloria Brown.

Scholars define four basic types of worldview: religious, scientific, philosophical and skeptical. They’re probably right; among people you can find representatives of all these types. But we don’t plan to study them in detail; we’re more interested in knowing, what are the proportions between them? We came to the somber opinion that no less than 90% of people are skeptics.

We already showed that practically none of those people who count themselves believers know even the fundamentals of their religion. A scientific worldview is held only by scientists, and philosophical only by philosophers, who together with scientists make up an insignificantly small layer of society. There are so many skeptics that they even form their own societies and take great pride in their skepticism, considering it, to all appearances, a sign of great intelligence. They proclaim – we won’t be deceived or cheated; we aren’t gullible simpletons, easily sucked in by any old drivel.

The basic principle of skeptics’ thinking is doubt, the notion that everything which lies beyond the bounds of one’s personal experience is unreal or fallacious. More often than not, elementary ignorance is hiding behind skepticism, and skeptics, ashamed (or not ashamed), hide this with a proud denial of everything they cannot comprehend due to the limits of their knowledge. And all the skeptic’s knowledge, as we already revealed, flows from his or her personal knowledge, which is often highly insignificant – it’s all just like in one famous parable about twins.

The Parable “The Twins’ Discussion”

“Two twins held a discussion in the womb of a pregnant woman. One of them believed in the combing life, the other was a skeptic.

Second Twin: You believe in life after birth?

First Twin: Yes, of course. Everyone knows that life after birth exists. We’re here so that we can become strong enough and ready for what awaits us later on.

Second Twin: That’s stupid! There can’t be any life after birth! Can you imagine what such a life would look like?

First Twin: I don’t know all the details, but I believe that it will be brighter and that we might walk on our own and eat with our mouths.

Second Twin: What foolishness! It’s impossible to walk on one’s own and eat with your mouth! That’s just ridiculous! We have an umbilical cord that feeds us. You know, I want to tell you: there can’t exist life after birth because our life is our umbilical cord, and it’s far too short.

First Twin: I’m sure that it’s possible. Everything will simply be a little bit different. That’s conceivable.

Second Twin: But nobody’s ever returned from there! Life just ends with birth. And in general life is just one big instance of suffering in darkness.

First Twin: No, no! I don’t know exactly how our life after birth will look, but in any case, we’ll see Mom, and she’ll take care of us.

Second Twin: Mom? You believe in Mom? And where is she?

First Twin: She’s all around us, we reside in her, and thanks to her we move and live; without her, we simply can’t exist.

Second Twin: Complete foolishness! I haven’t ever seen any Mom, and as such it’s clear that she simply doesn’t exist.

First Twin: I just can’t agree with you. Sometimes, when everything quiets down, you can even hear how she sings and feel how she touches our world. I firmly believe that our real life will begin only after birth.”

The discussions in this book are about things that are just as strange for many people as life after birth for one of the twins. For this reason, the question of faith and of its formation, on which is based our specific worldview, which then affects the form of our entire lives, demands detailed examination. We’ll immediately take a moment to make a very positive note: faith and worldview can change, drastically and quickly. So the skeptics and ignorant who are mired in their prejudices do not face a fatal diagnosis. Full emancipation (in other words enlightenment) from these grievous ailments is possible for everyone who really wants it. Those who really want happiness must first cure themselves of ignorance. This is possible under the following set of circumstances:

First: strong dissatisfaction with one’s life.

We emphasize the word strong. Almost everyone experiences simple dissatisfaction, but it’s not enough to start change.

Discontent with one’s current situation must be so sharp that it at least leads to sleeplessness.

Second: admission that one’s personal experience is too insignificant to reveal the path to life change.

Third: understanding of the fact that if there are after all happy people in the world, this means that in principle it is possible to achieve happiness.

Fourth: rejection of fatalism, the feeling of resignation, the opinion that some prewritten fate rules over the will of mankind.

We are sure that the facts presented in this book completely suffice to fulfill this condition.

Fifth: agreement that people are not born happy, but become happy, and that this means there is some sort of concrete recipe (unknown to the majority of people) for achieving this condition.

Remember that there are thousands more well-known “rags to riches stories” than stories about those “born with a silver spoon.”

Sixth: understanding that if recipes for a happy life exist, then they are written down somewhere and this information can be found.

Seventh: preparedness to receive new knowledge; rid yourself of any fear of it.

Eighth: rejection of the concept that everyone around you is a self-interested cheat and put your skepticism to rest at least while reading this book.

Our experience shows that change in worldview proceeds along two paths:

First path: natural, slow change in understanding as the result of gradual reception of portions of new information. When the first portion is grasped and accepted, there comes the second, then the third… and so, step by step, a belief system is born (or transforms). This is how the typical process of education in schools and universities proceeds.

Second path: sudden, sometimes even momentary, when an entire worldview changes under the influence of a strong external factor. Among those factors, clinical death holds first place. Everyone who has survived it returns to this world a completely different person. We affirm this not only because hundreds of such cases are described in the books of world famous doctor Raymond Moody, but also on the basis of personal experience of one of the authors of this book, who has survived clinical death twice.

The other factors are often heavy trauma as in the case of the Bulgarian clairvoyant Baba Vanga, immersion in regressive hypnosis or a lightning strike. At times a book can serve as such a strike of lightning, when “the roof flies off” and opens up a whole new view of the world and oneself. Admittedly, this is an extremely rare occurrence.

Gradual change of conceptions, without lightning and clinical death, can be traced through a simple example. Consider yourself right now to be not just a reader, but a participant in an experiment on transformation of consciousness.

Let’s imagine you heard that a person can live without his or her brain. Would you immediately agree with this assertion?

If you responded “yes,” the next question is “why?” and then you would need to present arguments supporting this point of view. And if you have such arguments, it means that you received them somewhere at an earlier time: heard them, read them, saw them in a pop-science film, etc.

If you never before encountered this question, you would have two more or less likely variations of answer. The first: “I am not aware of the topic, and as such I can neither confirm nor deny this.” The second, skeptical, would sound like this: “What stupidity! That’s just impossible!”

We now propose to step by step acquaint ourselves with the following information:

• In 1336 in Germany under King Ludwig the Bavarian, at the execution of Ditz von Shaunburg, the following incident took place. Ditz, being condemned for revolt, received the king’s word that he would pardon four rank and file soldiers in the mutiny if he (Shaunburg) could (after execution) run, without his head, past these four warriors, who were placed in a row eight steps away. The king was forced to uphold his word, which he gave to the condemned man before everyone, when Ditz von Shaunburg really did run past all four lance knights who were standing eight steps away.

Please, stop for a minute and think about your attitude towards the story described. Once you’ve formed an opinion, read on:

• In the review of Dr. Robinson at the French Academy of Sciences is described an even more unique incident. An elderly man in his sixties was wounded in the Parietal lobe by the sharp end of a skewer. This led to slight bleeding. For the length of a month the wounded man seemed fine. He then began to complain of poor vision, but felt no pain. A short time later the afflicted man unexpectedly died with signs of epilepsy. Autopsy revealed that the deceased had no brain. There was preserved only a thin shell of brain matter containing a putrid decomposed substance. For almost a month the man lived with practically no brain.

Again, pause and reconsider the question: how do you react to this? If you reach the conclusion that these are merely historical anecdotes and do not convince you of anything, then there are other, more modern stories. For example, this one:

• In 1935 at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York a child was born lacking a brain (absence of a brain at birth is called anencephaly). Nevertheless, in spite of all medical conceptions, the child lived, ate, and cried like all newborns over the course of 27 days. Furthermore, the child’s behavior was completely normal, as affirmed by eyewitnesses, and nobody even suspected that he had no brain until the autopsy.

Getting “warmer”? Or you still don’t believe like before? Then read on:

• In 1940 Doctor Augustine Iturricha made a sensational announcement to the Anthropological Society in Sucre (Bolivia) and presented his colleagues with a dilemma that even today remains unanswered. He and Doctor Nicholas Ortiz had long studied the illness of a fourteen year old boy who was a patient at Doctor Ortiz’s clinic. The adolescent ended up there because of a diagnosis that he had a tumor in his brain. The youth was fully in command of his reason and retained consciousness until the very end, complaining only of a headache. When pathologists performed the autopsy they were amazed. The entire brain mass had been separated from the internal cavity of the braincase. A large abscess had taken hold of the cerebellum and part of the brain. The question arose, what was this child thinking with? But the riddle that Ortiz and Iturricha came across was not as mind-bending as that which the famous German brain specialist Hufeland became acquainted with. He completely reconsidered all his earlier views after the autopsy of the braincase of a man who was stricken by paralysis. The sick man retained all his mental and physical abilities until the last minute. The results of the trephination were stupefying: in place of a brain the braincase of the deceased contained a little over 300 grams of water.

• In 2002 a little girl from Holland survived an intensive operation in response to a neurological infection (the diagnosis was Rasmussen’s encephalitis). They removed the left hemisphere of her brain, where the speech center is to this day thought to be located. Today this child astounds doctors with the fact that she has mastered two languages and is studying a third. The girl talks with her sister in perfect (for her age) Dutch, and communicates with her mother in Turkish. Doctor Johannes Borgstein, observing the little Dutchwoman, says that he has already advised his students to forget all the neurophysiological theories that they are studying and will study.

If these facts are too little for you, take a look into the authoritative scientific journal Nature; issues 415—420 from 2002 contain many similarly interesting materials.

In the preceding chapter we already mentioned Nobel laureate John Carew Eccles’s statement about the mind. We’ll now add to that the opinion of the great scientist and surgeon Valentin Voyno-Yasenetsky (1877—1961), who is also known as Luka, Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church. In his book Spirit, Soul and Body he asserts that “by its very construction the brain shows that its function is the transformation of outside stimuli into a well chosen reaction… The nervous system and the brain in particular, are not the apparatus of pure conception and cognition, but simply instruments designed for action.”

But even if the brain is absent, outside signals can be received by other organs. We earlier employed the example of how the beheaded Ditz von Shaunburg ran more than 20 meters. In Voyno-Yasenetsky’s book there is another example: “If a beheaded frog’s skin is irritated, it will take appropriate action directed at removing the irritation, and if it is prolonged, the frog will turn to flight and hop just as if it were not beheaded. In the wars of ants, which have no brain, there is clearly revealed premeditation and, accordingly, rationality, which in no way differs from that of a human being”.

Having studied a large collection of materials regarding the brain, we saw that in the last two decades science has definitively admitted the fact that the brain does not think and that mental functions are located beyond its boundaries.

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (544—483 B.C.) knew this 2,500 years ago; he said “The power of thinking is outside the body.”

Now tell us honestly, has your conception about the functions of the mind changed after reading these past four pages? We’ll honestly say that when we ourselves first encountered such facts we reacted to them with amazement bordering on aversion. Our belief system didn’t allow for the possibility of existence without a brain, even for a short time. But through the accumulation of information (of which only a small part was presented here) our views underwent a gradual change, which led to full acceptance of the fact, which is now a part of our belief system. And if someone were now to try returning us to our previous beliefs, this would prove to be impossible. We don’t simply believe in the possibility of life without a brain, we now know that this is so. Our faith regarding this specific question has received a strong foundation in light of our knowledge.

We are deeply convinced that for the modern person with an open mind only such faith, a faith founded on knowledge, has any meaning.

Only knowledge can serve as the basis of the new worldview that opens the road to a new life and to increase in one’s personal vibrations (remember that they need to be strengthened to the level of vibrations of the planet?). And only for this reason do we not simply state this or that fact which are Truths according to our conceptions, but include many arguments and proofs to support them. We well know that this complicates reading and makes it more demanding, but there is no other way if we want our book to bring readers practical benefit and not just a broadened horizon.

In our book, we will obviously be talking only about the soft, natural change of belief systems, through gradual acceptance of new, true knowledge.

There immediately arises the pointed and fully reasonable question: but where can one find true knowledge about the soul, Universe and meaning of life? And how does one separate the “wheat from the chaff” if we live in an ocean of illusions and fallacious conceptions? (Recall the multivolume Encyclopedia of Delusions that we referenced in the first chapter). How does one avoid falling from one delusion into another, no less harmful? Where is that prophet who can be trusted?

In modern times, the shelves of bookstores are literally breaking under thousands of books claiming to be “textbooks for life.” Among them there really are wise guides for changing one’s conscious, but readers’ skepticism renders them useless. Overcoming this most widespread of worldviews is undoubtedly difficult, and if an author didn’t work to include weighty enough arguments in defense of his or her views, the book will either be met with bayonets or will be indifferently laid aside after the first unsuccessful attempt at implementing it. This failure, of course, is written off by the reader as the author’s fault, not understanding that it is precisely the inadequacy of one’s own faith in the recipes presented that renders them ineffective.

The thing is that lack of faith is also a faith, but with a minus sign. For example, if a person doesn’t believe in his or her abilities, they believe that they don’t possess them. And the strength of the faith with a “plus sign” and faith with a “minus sign” are identical. As such, even the slightest distrust in information is capable of fully neutralizing it.

In 2006—2007 Australian television and radio producer Rhonda Byrne’s documentary film The Secret and her book by the same name, written about the contents of the film, received wide popularity in many countries all over the world. The film, released on DVD, and book not only became popular, they were thunderously successful and underwent millions of printings throughout the world. Time magazine included Rhonda in its 2007 list of most influential people in the world, and soon after this she was included in the Forbes rating of “The 100 Most Famous People.” The essence of The Secret can be briefly laid out: