The Recurring Nightmare
As a child, I cannot ever remember going to bed without a sense of fear and dread. I had a recurring dream or more accurately, a recurring nightmare. I was sitting on the basement steps of my home and there, I witness a horrible crime being committed. The perpetrator of the crime had not noticed my presence and as he continued his dastardly assault upon his victim, I had plenty of time to escape unnoticed by going up the steps, locking the door and returning to the safety of my upstairs home. But, unfortunately for me, I was unable to turn and move up the steps and thus escape the attention of the criminal. I seemed paralyzed with fear. Finally the crime was over. The execution was completed and now the perpetrator turned to leave the crime scene so that he could be free to kill again. As he turned, he spotted me sitting on the steps. I still had plenty of time to escape. All I needed to do was turn and run up the stairs and lock the basement door. Yet, I was paralyzed with fear. I tried to move but I remained frozen to the steps. I tried to scream for help, yet nothing came out. At first, his movements were slow, as if he thought that I had not noticed him spotting me. But as he saw me looking at him and attempting to scream, he picked up the pace. Finally, he reached the stairs and quickly accelerated up them. I, still frozen with fear, could do nothing to defend or save myself. He was upon me and it was quickly over for me. I had been unable to even get out a whimper, let alone a scream. I had done nothing. Fear had immobilized me and rendered me incapable of responding to the situation. The escape from this recurring nightmare has been my quest ever since.
Perceiving this world to be a living hell, I was always terrorized by the thought that when I died, I would have to come back to this earth and do it all over again. Therefore, I lived in a constant state of fear. Fear of what? Fear of the idea that I was not good enough to ever escape the torment that seemed to be my lot in life. Being raised a Catholic, I believed that I had been born in original sin and that God would judge me and find me wanting. If I escaped this earth, it would only be to be damned eternally to a place that was worse. Yet, I found it hard to imagine anything worse than being on this earth. On earth, you were constantly being judged and found not worthy. Being not good enough meant that you were also incapable of earning love. The universe was a cruel and loveless place. I was a victim. Everybody was out to get me and my major objective was not to be caught. By my teenage years, if you had awakened me from a deep sleep and asked me what my purpose was, I would have blurted out, “Not to come back here.”
The First Breakthrough
My first major breakthrough occurred in an unlikely place, my high school biology class. When discussing genetics, the teacher illustrated the probability of receiving a certain genotype. His example utilized the tossing of a coin and the likelihood that it would be heads. It seems that if a person were to flip a coin, each coin flip was independent of past results. The likelihood of each coin flip would always be 50% heads and 50% tails. No matter how many times you had flipped the coin in the past, with each new flip the odds remained 50-50. This meant that the past did not control the present or the future. This was a new concept to me. Prior to that, I had felt what had happened in the past must continue to happen in the present and the future. What I gleaned from probability theory was that the universe could be neutral. The past did not dictate the future. If someone had fourteen years of bad luck, that didn’t mean that he was doomed to have “bad luck” for the rest of his life. It opened my mind up to the possibility that the universe could actually be a neutral place and that good or bad “luck” was a 50-50 proposition. I perceived the possibility that I could have a run of fourteen years of good luck coming just as easily as bad luck. I could live in a world where the past did not determine the present or the future. This was now a possibility for me. I was slowly beginning my ascent from victim consciousness into becoming a proactive and creative force in my life.
Still as a teenager, I had another breakthrough. I read Napoleon Hill’s classic book Think and Grow Rich. That turned me on to the idea that thoughts are things and that “as a man thinketh, so he becomes.” I began my search for self-improvement and self-empowerment. This search, however, continued to have its major focus on escaping the confines of earthly existence. Planet Earth was still a place from which to escape.
The New Goal
In my early 20s, I took a proactive stance in regards to my life. I no longer saw myself as a victim and realized that this earth provided a vast array of possibilities. I wanted to avoid what I perceived as the traps of world materiality and getting too involved with earthly matters. Rather than attempt to change the earth, I felt that the earth would benefit best if I became a better me. By becoming a better person, I felt that I would be more capable of responding to any situation that the future might bring. That the best example I could give to the world was to live a good life. I felt that spirituality and wealth were incompatible. I wanted to adopt the attitude of a young child. Most children in their early years are inquisitive and absorbed in learning. A young child enters life with a sense of awe, adventure and wonderment. They see their world as a play school. This innocence and desire for learning often is transformed by our environment into the need to conform and please our family and society. The inquisitive sense of learning and awe is replaced by the need to earn their parents, peers and society’s approval. The need to get the right answer replaces the natural wonderment of the learning process and now life becomes drudgery. As we grow up, life becomes an attempt to earn someone’s love and respect. Life is no longer fun but rather a competitive struggle. As we move from early childhood into our teen and adult years, we gradually exchange our desire to be happy for our need to be right. Constant judgment leads us to sacrifice our happiness so that we can claim we are right even when we are dead wrong. Rightness, not our happiness, becomes the major objective of our life.
As a tool to help maintain my focus on the spiritual goal of escaping earthly bounds, I decided to change my last name. I wanted to maintain a young child’s attitude of wonderment while I learned to awaken from the nightmare of earthly limitations. I wanted to awaken to my true spiritual essence. In short, I desired enlightenment. Since I wanted to awaken from my childhood nightmare yet maintain the wonderment of the young child, I selected “Wake-Child” to be my new last name. By doing this, I would be constantly reminded of my spiritual goal. Anytime I heard, spoke or wrote my last name, I would be constantly reminded of my true life purpose.
The Journey
By my mid-20s, I was already an instructor for the School of Metaphysics. This is where I learned about manifestation or the creation process. Utilizing these tools of manifestation, I moved into the business world. I started a new lucrative and successful business consulting firm. What differentiated my firm from my competitors was that rather than just focus on the bottom line, we were equally concerned with the lifestyle of the owners and their employees. By moving into the competitive world of business, I was able to meld the esoteric with the material. I became a practical mystic. I learned to operate in the world but not necessarily be of the world. While operating this business, I continued to seek spiritual growth by delving into both Eastern religious practices and Western self-help programs. In the late 1990s, I was fortunate to work with Harry Palmer as an Avatar Wizard. Harry’s work provided the key to unlocking the power of what I would call discreation. Now I seemed to have both sides of the equation. The School of Metaphysics had taught the principles of manifestation and Avatar taught how to discreate any beliefs that no longer served me. You would think that having the power to create and discreate would result in the elimination of fear. But this was not the case. Instead, what I had learned was how to manage and mitigate fear. Yet, the elimination of all fear remained an unrealized and elusive goal.
Moving the Rig
When looking for oil, people tend to place an oil rig in one location and continue to drill the hole wider and deeper with the hopes that if they go wide and deep enough, they may eventually hit a pocket of oil. Others play it safe and drill in the vicinity of an already proven field. This method tends to reduce the risk of total failure. Yet, the overall gain in new oil is rather minimal. The new well is merely siphoning off part of the proven reserves of the old well. Yet, if we look historically, we will find that most new oil fields are discovered not by drilling wider and deeper, but by pulling the rig and moving it to a totally different area.
If we are to escape fear, one must be willing to examine their fear-based belief system. If your belief system is based on fear, you can dig deeper and deeper into the field of fear and yet never escape from fear. Why? Because you remain digging in the domain of fear. Since you refuse to leave the field of fear, the mitigation and management of fear becomes the only favorable scenario that could possibly be achieved In order to escape fear, one must be willing to explore a thought system that is not fear based. A Course In Miracles (ACIM) offers a new paradigm that allows the student to shift from a fear based thought system to one that is love based. ACIM offers the student a methodology to examine the beliefs that make up their current thought system. Once examined, if these beliefs are determined to be incapable of securing the prize that one seeks, it is insanity to expect different results by continuing to follow that same failed belief system. If one discovers that their beliefs about God, their world, and who they are consistently leaves them in fear, sanity would require that one look in another direction. You need to stop drilling in the field of fear and go somewhere else. You need to tell yourself that there must be a better way. ACIM offers an approach that not only allows you to minimize and mitigate your fears but offers a way out of fear itself.
In 2004, I first became aware of A Course in Miracles. Yet, when I first picked up the book, I realized that ACIM provided the missing link that had prevented me from achieving my goal of overcoming fear. It was a complete philosophical thought system that also contained a series of workbook lessons that if followed, would allow the ideas to move from the mind to the heart. The Holy Spirit seemed to call to me and I was ready. Although the Eastern religions had talked about the world as being an illusion, this concept had never really made much sense to me. Experience had taught me that this so call world of illusion could not be the work of a loving God. ACIM instead clearly states that God did not create this world. We did. And with that one thought, all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. This world is not a world of physical reality. Instead, it is a world of individuated perception. Our perception makes our experiences which we perceive to be our reality. As A Course in Miracles states, “If God made this world, He indeed would be cruel.” As long as I perceive my world to be created by God, I would always be able to the blame God for creating this world that blocked true happiness for myself and my loved ones. For any god that created this world could not be a God of unconditional love. As long as God’s love was not unconditional, it would have to mean that love was conditional at best and more likely impossible. You could never escape fear for there would always be the implied threat that God could withdraw His love if you failed to make the grade. If God’s love was conditional, it implied that God was constantly judging us to determine whether or not His love should be withdrawn. Love would have to be earned. If God did not create my world of individual perception, then God indeed could still be a loving God. This thought gave me the confidence to move the drilling rig from the field of fear to the field of love. ACIM says there are two emotions, fear and love. Each emotion has a thought system associated with it. Only in a love based thought system can fear be made to disappear into the nothingness from which it arose. Only love can bring us home.
The New Visionary Dream
I was walking through a deep forest. Suddenly I came to a clearing. I realized it was not just a clearing but the end of the forest. There, before me was a vast plain. There was a wall that divided the plain into two separate halves. On my side, the land was parched and dry. On the other side, green fields seemed to stretch into infinity. I approached the wall. It was thick, made of stone and too high for me to reach the top and pull myself over. I kept jumping but to no avail as the top remained just beyond my reach. I struggled to find a handhold that would give me the additional leverage that I needed if I was to reach the top. Finally, after many attempts, I was able to grab the top of the wall and I struggled to pull myself over the top. I succeeded. I laid resting on the top of the wall. The wall was about four feet thick so one could safely stand upon it As I laid on the wall, I heard a voice from the other side telling me to jump off the wall and claim my prize. I stood up on the wall and looked over the lush landscape and admired my prize. The other person at the base of the wall was there to help me. He was an angel. The angel exclaimed, “You’ve made it. Your home. Quickly jump and claim your prize.” Yet, just before I jumped to the safety of the other side, I paused for a moment and looked back upon the land that I had traversed. In the distance, there seemed to be some movement. I strained my eyes and was able to determine that another person was attempting to escape from that same forest. I yelled at the top of my lungs and waved my arms. He saw me. He started running towards me. The angel once again implored me to jump and save myself. I paused, and calmly said. “No, someone is coming. Let me help him scale this wall. It will only take a minute.” As the young man approached, I once again laid flat on the wall with my hand outstretched. The young man grasped my hand and I easily pulled him up. I then told him to jump down to save himself. He did not hesitate. He jumped down and he was home. Once again I stood on the top of the wall and prepared to jump down and join my comrade. But before I jumped, I heard someone else cry out from the distance. Another person had made their way out of the forest. Once again I hesitated, than decided to resume my post on top of the wall. Again, the angel told me to save myself. “Just one more,” I said. I got down on that wall and pulled my brother over. Before I could even get up, I saw another and yet another. They were now coming fast out of the woods and I called back to the angel and said. “Just one more! Just one more!”
I got caught up in the enthusiasm of helping each one over the wall. I was straddling this wall and pulling people over the top, yet I had forgotten that my goal had always been to get to the other side. I had wanted to be home. Finally I felt a strong arm on my shoulder. It was the angel. He pulled me to my feet. I was now standing face to face with the angel on top of the wall. I told him, “Leave me alone. There are other people to help.” Then the angel stepped back and physically turned me so that I could see down the length of the wall. And there on top of that wall that had been so empty were hundreds of people laying flat helping others over the wall. It seemed that some of the people that I had helped over the top had also stopped and joined in helping their brothers and sisters get home. Next, I saw a man who had been standing on top of the wall being handed a sledgehammer. He started pounding the top of the wall with that hammer. He pounded on the wall until finally a single stone gave way. Then another fell off. Then someone else grabbed a sledgehammer and started working next to the first man, enlarging the opening in the wall. Now the people at the base of the wall started clawing at the opening. They too began pulling the stones down. Finally, the opening had reached the ground and the people just started pouring through the wall. And then, the angel took my hand and together we jumped down. My work was over and I was home.