The Life-Changing Book Club 1: E-squared

 This is transcribed from my YouTube video @the-life-changing-book-club

THE LIFE-CHANGING BOOK CLUB 1:

E-squared 10th anniversary edition by Pam Grout 

Hay Publishing

Hello

This week’s book is this one. Is that backwards? Yeah.

It’s Pam Grout, it’s a book called E-Squared, and the subtitle is: Nine do-it-yourself energy experiments that prove that your thoughts create your reality.

Ok why am I reading this book? Well, manifesting has been a bit of a thing recently in the ether, and I wanted to explore it partly because of that and partly because my own mindfulness practice has got to a point when I’m thinking, mm, is there really anything in this? Is it time to surrender? And the title and the layout of the book appeals to my rational side in that it claims to be a kind of experimental manual on demonstrating to yourself that there is such a thing as a kind of something that responds to your thoughts. 

So first of all, I’m going to say I went into this book with a large amount of scepticism and also with an understanding that there are quite a lot of situation where our thoughts do create quite a lot of what we think of as reality. For example projection, where we have thoughts about ourselves that we attribute to other people. And unconscious motivations that trip us up.  

And you know we can see it every day in the people around us. There was somebody the other day who didn’t seem to have any idea that human beings could actually choose to be nice to each other for the sake of it, rather than because it would be to their immediate benefit. And I remember thinking what a bleak world they must live in. And at the same time my dear soul mate will tell you that there are times when I misinterpret what he says, even though it’s not very ambiguous, in the light of my own expectations. 

And as a psychiatrist there have been multiple occasions where I have noticed that essentially the same experiences are interpreted in different ways. So somebody who was brought up in the Catholic Church may see their good and bad auditory hallucinations as being God and the Devil on their shoulders arguing with each other. And somebody who has grown up with American TV may interpret them differently as the CIA somehow trying to put thoughts in their head. Or the Royal Family training them up to be a, I don’t know some kind of a spy! 

So those kind of things suggest that there might be something about us that somehow predates our sensations. OK. You can call it a filter, but calling it a filter suggests that the sensation is coming through the filter to us. Bu tI think it’s more that the filter is first and then the sensations are sought out through it. But whichever it is, this is the area that we’re talking about, that this book is talking about. 

OK, so let’s see. It’s been republished not very long ago for it’s tenth anniversary and there’s a preface. The first thing that she says in the book, in the introduction, is a quote from someone called Neville Goddard a Barbadian author and mystic. And he says, 

‘Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness.’

Which is not very far away from the Buddha quote that goes something like:

‘Our life is a creation of our mind.’

And I’m not saying either of these are right, I’m just saying there are two very different people from very different cultures saying approximately the same thing. 

Then she goes into Quantum Physics as a kind of ‘At last science has finally caught up with what religion and contemplative wisdom paths already knew!’ Which I’m gong to for the time being disregard, because it’s easy to read scientific hypotheses as a metaphor for things, and it’s difficult to know whether that’s useful. 

Her idea is that you can’t know something is true just by thinking about it, or reading about it. You have to actually experience it and that is effectively the scientific method. And so she sets out the book as a series of nine lab experiments. Nine experiments on different spiritual principles that you reading the book are supposed to do and record your results. Which appeals to me as an exercise. So I’m going to do it.

The first idea, the first strong suggestion is that in order for this to have any possibility of working, we have to let go of what we think it is that we know. Not to be brainwashed, but to be able to see other possibilities, so that we can do this experiment at all. So from a scientific point of view you have to stop believing the classic paradigm for long enough to come up with an experiment which is then able to disprove your hypothesis. So that’s what Einstein did with Newton’s Laws. So Newton’s Laws were absolutely fixed in stone. And then there were some indications that maybe it wasn’t quite covering everything, and Einstein came up with some ideas about situations where they might not work. So he let go of the idea that they were always true and therefore he was able to consider not only that they weren't true but what could take their place. So that’s what’s going on here. 

So the first hypothesis is called The Dude Abides Principle. The dude is from the point of view of the Big Lebowski, which is a film which is very amusing and classic Cohn Brothers film, to be recommended. So he calls God, or whatever it is is that we call God, he calls him The Dude. 

Now I have to say that there is a long section in this book talking about how God probably isn't what you think He is. In fact that He isn’t a He at all, He’s an it, He’s a forcefield, some kind of natural law like gravity, that I suppose you could say answers our prayers. I don’t know. All I know, what I want to test, is whether it is true that there is a natural consequence to my thinking in a particularly way. And I don’t actually need to know whether that’s because there’s a spiritual being. So I’m thinking if there is some kind of magic to my intention, then in fact God down’t have to come into it at all. I don’t know if you understand what I’m saying. God doesn’t have to come into it, it could simply be a consequence of the way our brains work. That the way the brain of human beings work, that if we go about something in a particular way, then it changes things. So that’s what I’m after is some kind of demonstration if that’s true and some more information about how that might be. 

I don’t know if that’s what the intention… in fact I think the intention of the book is to be a bit more sure to start with. In fact she seems to be sure about what’s going to happen and why. But this is an experiment and I will, as any good scientist, I will draw my own conclusions when I’ve got the results in. 

So, The Dude Abides Principle. Basically it says what it’s testing is the theory that, 

‘There is an invisible energy force or field of infinite possibilities. And it’s yours for the asking.’

We’re going to give the force forty-eight hours to make itself known. And I’m going to demand an unmistakeable sign that cannot be written off as coincidence. Worth a try, eh?

So to put this into details, she gives a kind of explanation of what he means by intention. So she wants us to understand that the way our brains were created was to narrow down what comes in. There’s a period during early childhood when loads and loads of brain cells are produced and link up in response to experience. And then there’s a moment, a time in childhood when all the brain cells that are not linked up die. They are weeded away, so you’re only left with the brain that was reinforced by your reality when you were really very young. I can’t remember exactly what age it is, maybe about five, maybe even earlier. So your entire life - it’s not just a psychoanalyst’s wet dream - it’s actually got a physical basis that your entire life is dictated by the boundaries that were put on your actual physical brain in your first years of toddlerdom. 

Which is interesting. And it suggests that there are a lot of possibilities that could be present in the world, a lot of possible different things, opportunities, feelings, ways of pronouncing words, lots of different possibilities that we can’t even see because our brain input is too narrow. (She says that without the brain development stuff.) 

So she’s saying, don’t give airtime to the reality that you’re trying to escape. So she’s saying let’s not allow our minds to dwell in the place where we think we know what’s out there. Let’s keep an open mind and let’s keep our minds on the experiment. 

So she’s kind of talking about it like it’s a different television channel. I suppose a radio channel. You can’t hear one channel while you’re listening to another. We have a tendency to keep going back to the original, to Radio 4. So whenever you find yourself slipping back to Radio 4 during this experiment, gently bring yourself back to the frequency for Radio X.

At the end of chapter one, is experiment number one: The Dude Abides Principle. 

The hypothesis is that there’s a 24/7 energy force that’s available to anyone, which I can access at any time simply by paying attention to it. ‘Furthermore if I ask this force for a blessing, giving it a specific time limit, it will respond with a gift and say “My pleasure”.

I’ve got to say she has a sense of humour so a lot of this is delivered not in the weird discursive way that I do it, but in an amusing way the way a popular journalist would. 

And the other thing is that she uses words like a blessing, a gift, which I’m slightly uncomfortable with because I’m being a scientist about it! But I’m going to go for it.

So what you have to do is make a page of a lab report of your experiment. You write today’s date and time, which is Monday 2.20pm, the date of receiving the gift is Wednesday at 2.20 and what you have to do is say I am giving you exactly 48 hours for you to let your presence be known, and I would like a sign that cannot be written off as coincidence. And considering I’m really good at writing things off as coincidence it will have to be very clear. OK. And that’s it.

So, let’s see what happens. My job is to keep my attention on this experiment that the intention, my intention to receive a sign in the next 48 hours. 

So watch this space!