"Clearly align your focus on the feeling you wish to have from your experience, you will have defined the meaning it holds for you. All the details necessary to facilitate that meaning, that occurrence, will happen without any additional efforting on your part." [Dialogue on Awakening, page 172]
"When turmoil or chaos appears in your mind, it will be experienced as a form of confusion and chaos outside your mind. You do not create unpleasant or uncomfortable circumstances to teach your self lessons. It is only that when there is a lack of clarity within your thought patterns, that lack of clarity will be reflected in the form of a chaotic life. The process is one where the ego receives information as to the confusion that exists and translates that confusion as not being able to control the outcome which becomes an unknown and therefore fearful. And as your attention is focused on these fears, they will become manifest.
"The message your ego allows you to receive from what I have just described will be quite different. It will say that once again, you have created something bad, something which you have interpreted as negative. This serves as its purpose very well, because it continues to keep your mind in a state of confusion and gives you the excuse to feel that there is something for you to do to straighten out the confusion.
"This type of thinking also leads you along another path which is not helpful; this is the one that tells you that something is controlling your life which is beyond your conscious ability to effect. This can come to you in two forms: as believing that there is another force of any type which has control over your life and which makes decisions for you, or, that the information can come from your subconscious mind which you feel is also beyond your level of understanding and therefore, beyond your control. I will tell you that neither of these are true.
"What appear to you to be the thought processes of your subconscious mind appear so because you are unwilling to be in touch with them. These thoughts or issues lie clearly within your conscious mind but have been there in a form unrecognized by you and in this lack of recognition lies the basis for confusion. It is this confusion which leads to the manifestation of your fears.
"Once again, the process works like this: there is confusion in your mind and this is interpreted as being out of control which creates fear. Once your attention has been directed to those fears, they will manifest in your life because they have become real in your mind. It is not possible for you to experience anything in your physical life that is not encompassed within your thought pattern.
"Now, your ego will take this statement and attempt to make you a prisoner of it. It will attempt to create feelings of guilt, saying to you, "Now see what you have done! Now see what a pretty mess you have made." Do not listen to this information. Hear instead the truer implication of what I am saying. To know with utmost certainty that nothing comes to you that is not held in your mind is an offer of total freedom. You do have the power to determine what will be in your mind.
"The question for you now arises, how then does this fit with prior information I have been given which says, try to empty your mind, try to free your mind from fearful thought patterns. I will tell you this message has as its specific meaning to give up the thought patterns which have been created by your ego mind, by your mind which has within it a sense of limitation based upon prior experience, old tapes as you would put it. My encouragement is to allow you to open your mind to peace, to the peaceful attitude you have which reflects more accurately your natural state of Mind, the state of Mind which reflects your Being. It is in this peaceful state that you will experience clarity, that you will experience the absolute certainty that when you create an experience in your physical life from this state of peace, there will be no confusion as to its outcome.
"There is no force outside of you that has any validity upon the Reality of your Being which would bring to you what you have called lessons of any nature that would be experienced by you as less than pleasant. When you have, however, developed a state of thinking which believes lessons learned are, for the most part, unpleasant experiences, then you will bring those lessons to yourself to be experienced in this way. Allow me to remind you that this mode of thinking is one which has been developed over eons of time during which you have convinced yourself that you are a guilty and unworthy person and are not entitled to receive the experience of love that is yours as the presence of your Being.
"When you allow yourself to reside more consistently in a peaceful state, the truth of this will become known to you. Let me put it another way: when you are in touch with your natural state of Being, when you are in a feeling of harmonious peace, and requests are made from this state, there is only one way for you to experience the results. When your mind is in a state of confusion and a state of fear, the only way for you to experience what is made manifest by those fears is in a fearful fashion. In its most simplistic form you may think of it like this: chaos in/chaos out, peace in/peace out, love within/love without.
"The meaning of what I am telling you is becoming more apparent. There is nothing that happens to you; there is only the thought processes and patterns, the state of mind in which you exist. That constitutes the sum total of it. What you experience as your physical reality is only a confirmation of what you are experiencing in your mind. And as you go through this awakening process, you will discover that it is not even necessary for the physical confirmation. All that is happening to you is happening in your mind.
"Should you continue to experience any unpleasantness in your physical existence, then know that there has been a value placed by your ego on these experiences. And once again, rather than judging yourself as being bad because you have allowed these to happen, see them as a reflection of what is going on in your mind, and choose again. Therein lies your freedom! Choose again, and again, and again and again until the process of your choosing becomes one of normally, naturally wanting to choose peace.
"Now, there is another thing which is troubling you and that is how can I choose peace, how can I consistently put these choices into effect in my mind when apparently my mind, my thinking, my life is so influenced by other lives around me? Allow me to assure you that this is another ploy of your ego to reinforce that your existing patterns can not possibly be changed unless all the other patterns around you conform to your way of thinking. And I will tell you, this is upside down. It will not be seen by you that any other patterns of thinking around you are changing until you have changed your own. It is in your thinking processes that you have perceived the ego processes that are apparently taking place in those around you.
"When I say you will only experience that which resides in your mind, I do not say this is true with the exclusion of how you would experience the effects of someone else's activities. There are no exceptions to this principle. As difficult as this will be for you to believe and understand, I will tell you this: when your mind resides in a state of total peace, when it is impossible for you to experience other than peace, you will see everyone around you existing within that same peaceful state. I do not offer this as an intellectual exercise in trying to understand how this would happen. I offer it to you simply as a statement of truth." [Dialogue on Awakening, pages 69-72]