“I am a genius and I apply my wisdom.” I failed high school. I struggled through seven years of university. Therefore, if I am a genius it is certainly not academically. Affirmations, statements we make to ourselves, do not have to be true to be true.
And if life has beaten you down and you get an affirmation that expresses some grandiose idea about the possibilities of your life, you are more than likely going to enter into the scepticism realm and even deny the possibility of the affirmation.
There is the thing in the world called placebo. If you study placebo you will be shocked to discover that even when people know that a sugar pill has been given to them to cure their hurt headache, it works. Neurolinguistic programming works on the same basis. It programs our mind to believe whatever we want to believe. Sadly, through academic education and parental diminishing of possibilities we end up being realists. In becoming realists we probably do our job better and become better at owning a house and driving a car, but we become psychologically and mentally disabled.
Self belief requires a degree of imagination. Reality is not always real. Your partner or boss will tell you something that is to their advantage. They will not always tell you the truth. Your eyes will interpret the behaviour of other people based on your ego and memories and therefore is imminently changeable as you change the prescription of your glasses. And so the world is not fixed in reality. The world is as you wish it to be.
When I was 14 years old I was showing my friend how to steal cars. I was up to the count of 150 cars that I had stolen over the previous 18 months and I was really proud of that record. I hope that there is no retribution this many years later for confessing to those crimes. But I remember clearly, my friend saying to me, “Walker you’re a fucking genius.” Of course I diminished what they had said because what I was doing, for me, was easy. I didn’t think it was genius at all, and given my academic results at high school, I failed high school, I was justified in believing I was no genius.
Affirmations are not meant to be true in our mind. Affirmations are meant to be true. In other words a good affirmation is stating a point of fact and whether we believe it or not is the only variable. The fact is I am a genius and I do apply my wisdom. The reason I need to recite this affirmation is because I don’t believe the affirmation. If I believed the affirmation I wouldn’t need to say it for the last 30 years.
When a meme lodges itself in our brain, such as when I say to myself, I am an academic loser, the purpose of an affirmation is to argue with that inner voice and give it an alternative thought. It is extremely interesting. If you sat me down and put a gun to my head and asked me to say with conviction”I am a genius and I applied my wisdom,” I would say it. I believe it. But if I’m given the option I won’t believe it. There have been enough examples of my lack of genius to argue the opposite.
The affirmation it self is unquestionably accurate. Every human being on this planet is a genius in some aspect of life, usually an aspect they themselves don’t recognise because it is their second nature, it comes easy to them, it may not be measurable in the classic sense of their IQ, but it can be witnessed. Therefore you are a genius. You can search for validation of the opposite or you can search for validation of the affirmation. Whatever you choose to believe you will achieve. Including negative self talk.
I recently while watching the tour the France, the commentators were talking about one bike rider who was descending down a hill at 90 km/h in the rain. They told a story about this bike rider having a serious bike accident and losing their confidence in descending. The art of descending fast on a bike is throwing the bike over onto an angle and trusting these little rubber tyres will not slide out from underneath. It is, at speed, 100% a matter of confidence and trust. In spite of all the psychological support that this bike Rider got including neuro linguistic reprogramming, he could not regain the confidence he needed to be at the tour de France. To fix this problem, his coaching team I hired a rally car driver to teach the bike rider how to corner at speed on dirt in a racing car. In other words they had to re-train his body memory. And so you can see that affirmations alone do not work. If we are seeking information to validate the negative, we will find it and reinforce the body memory. Affirmations therefore require belief in order to cause change.
I was fortunate enough in my life to meet such a genius. He dropped out of high school at the age of 14 and was given a note by his parents to allow him to backpack around the world. He ended up in Hawaii where, on drugs, he surfed day and night. One night, this person attended a ceremony around a campfire where a shaman was teaching people about purpose in life. When it came to my friend’s turn my friend laughed. His self talk and the results of his life up to this date had given him the belief that he would amount to very little. The shaman persisted. My friend declared at the end of the ceremony that he wanted to be a healer. And with the shaman’s certainty, that this was a true and possible destination, my friend took up a series of affirmations that he would say to himself every day for the rest of his life. One of these affirmations was “I am a genius and I apply my wisdom.”
The Sharmans certainty transferred into those affirmations and into the mind of my friend. He could not get away from the thought that the shaman believed my friend was a genius and he would apply his wisdom in the realm of healing. With this taunting him day and night, he packed his bag, went home, enrolled in the high school program, studied healing, studied chiropractic, studied dentistry, studied astrology, and by the time he was 20 years old he was lecturing other students 3 to 4 years above his grade at university. Most of his study was done in the bookshop where he could read books for free. He told me a story about sticky notes. Every book he read every time he came to something important to be remembered, he organise that knowledge into index cards. He then summarised the index cards and pasted information on sticky notes and plastered it up on his dormitory wall. He then charged people to come in and study from the index cards and the sticky notes which were organised under topic and book title.
The driving force of my friends application and dedication to becoming a healer was not his own belief that he was a genius. It was the belief of the shaman. The shaman had shocked the meme of my friend, rattle his cage so to speak, and with that my friend became an unquestionable genius. Not bye natural talent but by heart commitment.
As a professional speaker I was taught never to let the truth get in the way of a good story. It’s sort of a joke about elaboration and entertainment in storytelling. My friend and I had a business together for 10 years in the US and Australia running workshops and retreats. And so, my friends story about his sticky notes and index cards, I digested with a degree of speaker professionalism, in other words, I thought it might be an exaggeration of the truth. But one day I met two people who attended that university and who had paid to be in that room with the sticky notes. I also, on one trip to Texas, went into the storeroom where all the index cards remained. Tens of thousands of boxes of index cards all labelled. On each index card were thousands of words tiny print almost the size of an ant crawl. The estimate was 100,000 books had been distilled into these cards. And the topic was healing.
Affirmations do not work unless we have a purpose greater than ourselves. Affirmations directed at people who have a purpose of happiness, self aggrandizement or emotion, fight against an internal dialogue which is locked into the Memes to create identity. But when we find a purpose greater than ourselves for our action in life, then we give birth to possibilities, we get energy and motivation to do things that are uncomfortable, we measure our selves on a different scale. And on that scale we are all geniuses. We are genius when we find a purpose greater than ourselves and realise this is where our true genius lies.
I do not teach happiness. Happiness has never been natures motivation. All nature reaches for the sun. All nature has a purpose greater than its self. The tree grows but the tree is part of an incredibly important echo system. The sand washes up and down on the beach, each grain unimportant in itself, but forming part of a very important infrastructure that moves to enable the earth to remain balanced against the pull of the moon. Every grain of sand has a purpose greater than its self.
You have a purpose greater than yourself. The transition from self-motivated to living on purpose is a significant one. You have a purpose in life and when you find that purpose you find your genius. Because nobody on earth can do that purpose. Nobody else has the backdrop, the backstory, the history the experience or the knowledge to live your purpose. But it is also important to realise that there is a degree of self belief that comes hand-in-hand with living on purpose. In the case of my friend, the shaman held that belief and my friend believed in the shaman.
One of the rituals in the Himalayas with the monks is that when you give them something you would like them to bless, they hold it carefully, chant a prayer onto it, and then you bend forward and they tap it on the top of your head. Sometimes harder than you expect. It’s a weird process. I have had many prayer flags and scarves blessed by the highest monks in the Himalayas, and when they tap these things on my head something happens like being plugged into a super PowerPoint. There is a transference takes place in the tapping. I’m not going to intellectualise what is taking place but I do know that the certainty of the monk transfers across into me in that moment.
The great benefit of the Internet is that we can communicate any time anywhere. We can do coaching on the phone. We can solve problems and inspire greatness. We can make videos and run even a 30 day life changing challenge via the Internet. We don’t even have to meet each other. But there is one thing missing. The certainty. The transference of certainty cannot be passed through the Internet, nor through a book, nor through a video. Certainty comes from the heart. It can travel. It doesn’t need to be in physical proximity to be transferred. Every day I visualise every client I work with and transfer the certainty. But there is a lot of noise out there.
You are a genius and you apply your wisdom. Of this fact I am 100% certain. It is where you are on purpose. And your purpose can never be achieved, those are goals. You have no option but to live your purpose. You may think that you are building a home or going to work for your family, but this is never the case at the level at which we are speaking here. Inadvertently, even accidentally, you have no option but to live your purpose no matter where you are or what you do. And therefore your genius is on display 24 seven. The only question is whether you know this or not.
Certainty in life has taken a tumble. When the world trade Centre collapsed, so to did certainty. A whole generation of people were impacted. It was no different for those who live through the first and second world wars, the terrible violence of tsunami, and now, the confusion of Covid. Certainty has taken a tumble because nature has demonstrated the unpredictability of life. This uncertainty that has become the motivating force of most of the worlds population has triggered a search, a search that commercial enterprise have taken advantage of. The new age is offering solutions that don’t work. Tribes and clubs are offering community in which to shelter and find some collaboration. Corporate cultures are becoming inclusive in order to create loyalty and bonding within business as a recognition that uncertainty breeds discontent. To live purpose one must have certainty.
So where are you going to find your certainty? You won’t find it in your job because you can be fired tomorrow. You won’t find it in your relationship because if it can breathe it can change. You won’t find it in wealth, because wealth doesn’t make people sleep deeper. You won’t find it in a temple that has been proven by the number of people who visit such places and suffer extreme mental health problems. The appetite to believe in something that gives us certainty has never been higher. But the solutions that are being delivered are more escape routes that they are solutions.
Come with me now just for a moment on a journey. If you can close your eyes please do so but don’t do that if you are driving the car. Not a wise choice. On the planet, we have global warming, we have economic movement, we have covid, we have governments and international trade and the Internet, we have pornography, we have sex trade, we have crime and we have the attempt by billions of people to do the right thing. Most of those billions define the right thing based on the culture there in all the religion they follow. So even the right thing is Nebulus at best. So we are going to leave the planet just for a minute to try to make sense of it all.
As you rise up above the planet you will notice that global warming is taking place just as global cooling took place many thousands of years ago. You will notice that the forests are being chopped but the plankton in the ocean is expanding. You will notice one group of people going to the left and the other group of people going to the right. You will see the tide come in on one shore and the tide go out on the other shor at the same time. What do you will see is a miracle. The miracle is that there is order in the chaos we call uncertainty. But that’s still an earthly view. Let’s travel further out away from the earth and sit for a moment on the moon.
Looking back at the earth from the moon we see a ball. It is spinning around but it is also travelling through space at around about 1,000,000 miles every day. It’s orbiting the sun. The sun can fit 100,000 births into it without a blink. And so we get a new perspective on size. Now the miracle becomes even more fascinating when you begin to realise how small this ball is we call earth compared to the environment it is in. It is estimated that there are 50 billion galaxies each of which has in the vicinity of 5 to 10,000,000,000,000 stars in it, each of which is potentially larger in the magnitude of 100 times that our own son. Our little ball is spinning through space at 1,000,000 miles a day, rotating at a speed that holds water captive and the atmosphere captive enough for human habitation. And that human habitation is designing things like the Internet which is quite a miracle in itself. And as we are out here, and while we are out here, marvelling at the dimensions of space ask the question again “where do I get my certainty?”
You will come to realise that you will not get certainty from anything that transpires on the little ball we call Earth. On earth our view point is too small. For most people on earth they can’t get past their own feelings, emotions and Memes, let alone consider certainty. Those feelings, emotions and Memes are a driving force for individual obsessed with themselves, with pleasure over pain. For them the concept of a certainty other than avoiding pain is impossible. But we are out here on this short trip in space looking back at earth. We recognise that they cannot be certainty on the earth because our view is too small. But out here in space a certain awareness comes over us. The ball itself we call earth does not collide with the moon, it stays in orbit around the sun, millions of astroid’s bypass the earth because of the protective atmosphere and radiation, and the sun’s rays keep the earth habitable by a certain shape of human. And now we begin to realise that certainty comes through is not from us.
The certainty we can have is that there is a miracle in the existence of the earth itself. Nature. Nature is the universe the universe is nature. In the miracle of a tree or a leaf we can see the universe. And to understand the universe may be well beyond the greatest scientist on earth, but if you understand the universal laws you may find that certainty you are searching for. The universal laws that run the universe, also run an atom, molecule and subatomic particle. And if you understand the universal laws that run atoms you understand the universal laws that run thought because thought is the movement of atoms, molecules and subatomic particles. When you come to realise that you have some connection to those universal laws through your thoughts, you come to realise that the laws that run nature, run the universe, and, if we are genius, run our thoughts.
When we go for a promotion at work, when we deal with a conflict in our lives, when we aspire to love and hold a loved one who is in need, when we bank our money or spend it on a T-shirt, when we eat meat and drink red wine, when we take a P or a poo, when we smile, we are not separate from that magnificent miracle that we witness out here in space, we are actually living the miracle. Whether we recognise that miracle is up to us. Sometimes our body memory wishes to hold onto the uncertainty because it can feel more exciting and emotionally engaging. But when you finally find your heart and find the temple in your heart, you will realise that life itself is the temple. You will experience the miracle of space in your next cup of coffee, you will recognise your purpose, you will understand what goes on around you is in perfect order, and there’s nothing to change just something to love.
Although I write this blog each day about what I wish my dad had taught me, I am in this instance so glad he didn’t teach me the affirmation that “I am a genius and I apply my wisdom.” Because the quest to learn it, discover it and believe it has been the most beautiful adventure and journey of all. I’m so glad I didn’t know it before I was ready to believe it. When the student is ready the teacher appears.
With Spirit
Chris