I REPLACED EVERY INSTANCE OF GOD WITH LOVE! SORRY, WAYNE.
Getting In The Gap
- Dr. Wayne Dyer
Inside flap of book:
The book starts out with this quote:
"Through the rise and fall of empires, through the creation of vast bodies of symbols that give shape to our dreams; through the forging of magic keys with which to unlock the mysteries of creation...through it all we are marching from epoch to epoch towards the fullest realization of our soul."
"Yes, we are coming, the pilgrims, one and all - coming to our true inheritance of the world, we are ever broadening our consciousness, ever seeking a higher and higher unity; ever approaching nearer to the one universal truth which is the All - comprehensive all embracing."
- Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941
I couldn't find the pdf online for free, so I started typing. Here's the Intro and the whole first chapter:
The gap is an exquisite place! It's a place where miracles occur. The gap is owned by everyone on this planet. It's yours to enter at will. What awaits you in the gap is the experience of activating the higher human dimensions of insight, intuition, creativity, and peak performance; as well as coming to know relaxation, enchantment, bliss and the peace of making conscious contact with Love.
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As you begin reading this short book and listening to to the CD that accompanies it and begin the practice of going into the gap, keep uppermost in your mind that you can enter this glorious gap between your thoughts at any moment you choose. The power of the gap is available to you in the midst of a business meeting, at the dinner table while engaged in a heated discussion, on the 18th tee of a long day on the golf course, or even while riding on a crowded bus.
You own the gap! No one can take it from you, and the doorway into the gap is always unlocked and available to you. Once you master the techniques for entering the gap, you'll find yourself seeking out the wondrous energies of this miraculous place frequently. No one will even know that in the quagmire of a horrendous traffic jam where everyone around you is steeped in frustration and anxiety, you've dismissed them all and have chosen the serenity of the gap, if only for a moment. Doing so will reinvigorate your soul and remind you to be in a state of appreciation rather than depreciation. You've left the mob of people who are looking at this moment as an occasion to be offended, and have entered the gap where you're now using it to be in a state
xi of peace. Such is the value of knowing how to slip into the gap at will with a few short internal mental images.
The gap will teach you how to listen like you've never listened before. Now take the letters that make up the word listen and rearrange them so they spell out silent. listen/silent - listen/silent - the same in content only arranged to appear different from each other. When you listen, you'll feel the silence. When you're silent you'll hear at a new level of listening. Try it in the gap, then begin to apply it in all of your interactions. Listen with silence. Not that the word silence and the word license also have the exact same letters as well. Silence gives you a license to listen and be silent simultaneously. By going into the gap and using the methods suggested here in this work, you'll come to treasure the space between your thoughts. For its in this silent space called the gap that you'll come to make conscious contact with Love. I send you love and peace as you begin this journey.
- Wayne W. Dyer
"What is at work during inner silence is another faculty that man has, the faculty that makes him a magical being..."
- don Juan Matus
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Chapter One
Why Meditate?
Why meditate? Anyone reading this book has at one time or another considered the question and can come up with all sorts of answers. Some of the many reasons to meditating include reducing stress, cultivating a sense of peace, eliminating fatigue, slowing the aging process, improving memory, finding clarity of purpose, and even healing. All of these are powerful motivators for beginning a meditation practice. Who wouldn't want the healthy, happy and purposeful life that is the result of these benefits?
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However, all these reasons pale in significance to the realization that meditation is our way of making conscious contact with LOVE.
The paramount reason for making meditation a part of our daily life is to join forces with our sacred energy and regain the power of our Source(LOVE). Through meditation, we can tap in to an abundance of creative energy that resides within us, and a more meaningful experience of life, which enriches us permanently. By meditating, we come to <i>know LOVE rather than know about Love. However, before we can make the shift to a more enriching life, we have to tame our ego.
Taming the Ego
What is ego? Essentially, it's an idea that we carry around with us about who we really are. We all have an ego, and it's quite useful at times, but given the upper hand, it disconnects us from Love. Most of us personalize our ego with some of the following thoughts:
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I am what I do.
I am what I have.
I am seperate from Love.
I am what others think of me.
I am seperate from everyone else.
I am seperate from what is missing in my life.
Sometime during our life, we identified ourselves as variations of these six beliefs. Our physical body became the means for identifying ourselves as distinct from others. Possessions, achievements, and reputation became our calling cards. Things we believed were missing became goals. This aspect of ourselves is what I am calling ego. We need to tame the ego so that we can regain our all-encompassing source of power.
Our sense of empowerment is diminished when we identify solely with the ego, whose main concern is the physical world. If it were truly a part of the physical world, we'd be able to check
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into a hospital for ego reconstruction, or even better, an "egoectomy." The ego is our idea of how to be safe and loved in our physical reality. We've separated from our Source when we engage exclusively with the illusions of the ego. It's only an idea and nothing more, yet this idea can keep us from knowing our Source. But with just the slightest alteration of this idea, we begin taming the ego.
All that we need to do is shift to the awareness that we can choose the ego when needed, and we can choose to select the power of our Source. Once we choose to tame the ego, we have the opportunity to make conscious contact in meditation and know Love directly. We, then, are like the raindrop described by the 19th-century Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib: "For the raindrop, joy is entering the river..." An untamed ego will get in the way of this divine experience. In essence, this is entering an experience of oneness.
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Oneness Is Indivisible
One quality that distinguishes our source, LOVE, from the outer world is that it cannot be divided. Oneness defies being compartmentalized. For instance, our physical world is divided into dark and light, but the source of light, the sun, defies division. Or consider the nature of silence. It has been said that Love's one and only voice is silence. No matter how you attempt to slice it up or cut it in half, silence is always silence. This indivisible root source of oneness is where the act of creation originates.
Indivisible oneness is the creative energy that turns a seed into a maple tree or a watermelon or a human being or anything else that's alive. It's invisible, omnipresent and absolutely indivisible. We can't divide oneness. Meditation offers us the closest experience we can have of rejoining our Source and being in the oneness at the same time that we're embodied. This means that we have to tame our ego.
When we meditate, we begin to still the mind. As we get more and more adept at moving into inner silence, we come to know the peace of Love in our entire being. We intuitively seek union with our generating Source. Silence,
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or meditation, is the path to that center. We can make conscious contact with Love, transcend the limitations of a dichotomous world, and regain the power that is only available to us when we're connected to the Source. This is what I call getting in the gap. It's where we create, manifest, heal, live, and perform at a miraculous level. The gap is the powerful silence we can access through meditation. By entering the elusive gap between our thoughts, we can access the stillness that may have been unattainable in other meditation attempts.
Our Thoughts Keep Us From Silence
Our ultimate reason for meditating is to get in the gap where we enter the sacred space and know the unlimited power of our Source. Psalm 46:10 says: "Be still, and know that I am Love." To know is to banish all doubt. Being still in meditation can take us to that awareness. But if you've tried meditating previously, what you're more likely to know is that your thoughts won't be still.
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I find it helpful to think of my mind as a pond. The surface of the pond is similar to my mental chatter. On the surface of the pond are the disturbances. Here there are storms, debris, freezing and thawing, all on the surface. Beneath the pond surface, there is relative stillness. Here it is quiet and peaceful. If, as has been said, it's true that we have approximately 60,000 separate, often disconnected, thoughts during the day, then our mind is like a pond that's full of whitecaps from a choppy breeze. But beneath that surface chatter is the gap where we can know Love and gain the unlimited power of reconnecting to our Source.
Meditating is a way of quieting our chatterbox thoughts and swimming below the surface. This is where we can be still and know(not know about) Love. If we have approximately 60,000 thoughts every day, then in all of our waking hours, it's unlikely that we ever get to the point where there's any space between our thoughts. How could we? With one thought leading to the next, either rationally connected or otherwise, there's simply no time or place to get into the gap between our thoughts. Yet it's precisely in that gap that the magic and the infinite possibilities await us. I'll explain more about this euphoric gap and how to get there in the chapters that follow.
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The practice of meditation takes us on a fabulous journey into the gap between our thoughts, where all the advantages of a peaceful, stress-free, healthier, fatigue-free life are available, but are simply side benefits. The paramount reason for doing this soul-nourishing meditation practice is to get in the gap between our thoughts and make conscious contact with the creative energy of life itself. But this is a choice that's entirely the responsibility of each individual. We have the potential to be instruments of the highest good for all concerned and to be miracle workers in our own lives. No person, government, or religion can legitimately claim to do this for us. In fact, I agree with Carl Jung, who once said that one of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of LOVE.
I encourage you to master getting in the gap with the meditation called Japa, which I will describe in this book, and lead you through on the enclosed CD. As you engage in prolonged meditation sessions, and experience what you bring back to the material world, you will know Love...and you'll know why you chose to meditate.
Okay, that's the whole first chapter. I collected all the quotes every subsequent chapter has at the beginning. QUOTES FROM BOOK
If you enjoyed this please look through my Wayne Dyer page.
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