By Jonathan Jackson
It is only through awakening that we can truly live a life of fulfillment. Joe Vitale discusses the four stages of awakening and what it means to take control of your destiny.
Most people – with very rare exception – are born into a state of mind, a social psychosis in which they are taught to be victims of their own circumstance. According to bestselling author of The Attractor Factor (Second Edition) and one of the stars of The Secret, Dr. Joe Vitale, this is a necessary state of being, but temporary.
Joe is the architect behind a program called the Awakening Course, a four step program that tackles the psychology behind people's inability to live the life they truly want and deserve. The course is the culmination of Joe's journey and subsequent teachings. It is a learning program that is as much about the past and present, as it is the future; for without past glories or mistakes, there is no future.
Joe breaks the course down into four stages: Victimhood, Empowerment, Surrender and Awakening.
"The first stage sees people walking around in quiet desperation, feeling the world is against them," says Joe. "They have no power, control or influence and only a few moments in their lives where they are happy."
Joe says it is the culture of desperation that is instilled in us at birth that is responsible for this malaise.
"Religion, family, friends, even community services all train us to feel like we're a victim, because that is how things are done. The school system doesn't teach us to be success minded it teaches us to be survival minded. And so the victim mentality is something we are brainwashed into living the moment we are born."
When Joe first realised he was living the victim mentality, he was around 28 years of age. His first step to awakening was borne of the situation he was in at the time and had lived previously. He had come from an abusive childhood, was estranged from his father, homeless and at times working menial jobs that meant nothing to him but a small paycheck at the end of the week.
Joe found solace in the public library among the inspiring works of some of the world's greatest self-help authors.
"Thank god for the public library because when I was struggling and homeless and in poverty I could have the treasures of the world at my fingertips for nothing."
Joe on relationships
"You can have the perfect relationship because the perfect relationship is within yourself. Everything on the outer is a reflection of your inner relationship. And if you have a peaceful inner relationship, then what you have on the outside is reflected in that. Too many people think they will be hurt so they are walking on a minefield. What you want is to grow from that to a point of unconditional love.
Joe on being open
"Sigmund Freud said the number one way to have mental health was to have no secrets. In other words get everything off your chest, out of the closet, confess, reveal and I think more importantly forgive everything because secrets and unforgiveness keep psychic energy locked within you and you don't have energy going through you to participate in thinking big."
Books like The Magic of Thinking Big and Think and Grow Rich and all the self help psychology books the library could hold gave him the awareness that he had more power than he ever credited himself with.
"It started to stir me, if not awaken me. I realised that I had been a victim and if I didn't wake up and didn't snap out of it and do something different then I would die a death like everyone else."
One of Joe's mantras is that the more education you have, the better prepared you will be for life's challenges. And this doesn't necessarily mean institutionalised education, for although Joe went to Kent State University in Ohio and has received two doctorates, he considers himself self-taught.
"The education and wisdom has come from the dedication to growing, stretching and awakening," Joe says. "I put myself on more of a self-study course than any school system would ever have done."
Yet he believes the type of education he has dedicated himself to should be taught in schools, particularly in the current global financial climate. What better way to educate children to be successful than by empowering them at an early age in institutions that are traditionally conservative.
"The number one thing to do in schools is to introduce success literature," Joe iterates. "They need to teach empowerment on thinking big, co creating their own reality even if it's at kindergarten level. Some of this goes into quantum physics, but for the most part just introducing success literature and that whole body of work that has evolved from the 1800s, from Emerson to Hill and W. Clement Stone and my own work hopefully, that would get people thinking differently.
"People are ready for this," he continues. "We are stretching because we are open to something new. We're saying what we have been doing for centuries isn't working and I think there's an opening because of that. I think the current chaos has created this window of opportunity where we can say, ‘hey look, we've tried everything else, what about meditating in school, or reading success literature; have we tried ‘consciousness creates reality' programs in school.
"We have all these tools now to assist this shift. Movies like The Secret, Opus, Leap, Try it on Everything, and The Awakeners, all of these are the visual tools that people need today because they are lazy and for the most part don't want to read. Now they can just slide in a DVD and get reprogrammed and realise that if they think big and take action they can get results."
This brings us to the second stage of Awakening: Empowerment. You can have all the education in the world and all the realisation too, but if you don't act upon your opportunities, if you don't take the chances the universe is offering and do something quickly with it, then your realisations mean zip.
"One of the reasons why I'm so prolific is that when an idea comes to me I treat it as a gift and immediately act on it," Joe says. "When somebody moves into that stage of empowerment they realise they have control of their future; they participate in the ideas and the energy coming to them. When an idea comes to them and they are still in a victim mentality they talk themselves out of the idea; ‘it's not going to work', ‘I don't have enough money', ‘I don't have the education' ..."
When people reach the empowerment stage they are ready to take action. Even if they don't know how an idea will work, or what they have to do to fulfill the opportunity presented to them, they will find a way. Once they are able to do this, they are a step closer to being comfortable with themselves and being at one with the universe.
Awakening is about coming to terms with who you are, what you want and realising that you are the universe. This is a difficult concept to grasp, but the last two stages of Joe's course go a long way to explaining what this means and how to take action to achieve this end.
Once you have learnt to take hold of the opportunities presented to you, the next step is to understand that you are not completely in charge of the events that surround you.
"I can't make it rain," Joe explains. "I have more power than I ever expected than when I was in the victim mentality and I can execute more of that power in the empowerment stage, but at a certain stage I can bump up against the reality that I don't control the universe. I am a participant in it. That is the third stage of awakening – surrender. To me the life energy that we are part of is bigger than all of us. It has an intelligence that has given us a path to follow that is unique to each of us and when we're on it life has more of a flow to it."
You can try to shake this path and sometimes our egos dictate that we take a different direction to the one that is being mapped out by the universe, but according to Joe, the journey will be a rough one.
"When you follow your destiny path, however, it seems like all of the big things come to you magically and you don't have to try as much. You're still taking action, but you're not frustrated or angry by it."
Yet ego is not a dirty word, it is necessary for the survival of humanity; for the survival of the individual through dark times. "The ego is a wonderful tool that keeps us alive," Joe says. "However when you reach the fourth stage of awakening which to me is Awakening, your ego has now dissolved and you are simply one with the universe."
For many people the dissolution of ego is problematic, because it equates with success. Joe says that people have to get past the voices that are playing the part of the ego so they come to situations from a witness standpoint.
"There's two ways to look at. If you look at it from the victim role, you look at situations from a harmful experience and your ego hurts you, but if you look at it from a stage four perspective, you realise this is a part of a journey and it has served you in getting to a place where you can awaken.
"If I had not had the difficult experiences in my life, I may not have learned what I did and grown and expanded to a place of awareness where I have more control. The idea is to accept those experiences, rather than reject them.
"Awakening is when you look back at your life and your life's journey and know that it was all good and you have no regrets; you've forgiven yourself and everybody else and it's served its purpose to bring you to where you are now."
Awakening is about experience, about observing what goes on around you. It is to realise that everything you want is here in this moment.
"My own life has been a process of awakening and that is no different for anybody," Joe says.
"If anybody reads my books they will be able to map out my journey of consciousness. The first books were about marketing and sales and copywriting and they came from the perspective that you are not a victim and you can make money. When I wrote The Attractor Factor it was representative of me being in stage two, the empowerment stage. Then I wrote Zero Limits because of the therapist I had met who had healed an entire ward of mentally ill criminals without doing anything except surrendering. So I learnt about surrendering just by writing the book. Then I kept working on myself and had satori experiences, which is many moments of awakening which led me to believe in the fourth stage of permanent awakening where the ego dissolves. I've discovered this because I've been living it.
"For me mapping has made things easier. I believe that the hell I went through in childhood to get to this lifestyle happened because I was going to be the guy to map out the four stages of Awakening."
Buddha says the secret to existence is to have no fear. It is fear that holds us back from awakening, but once the realisation occurs that at the heart of awakening is the essence of self and being at peace with yourself and therefore the universe then fear is a past experience.
"Unconditional love is the term that would sum up the awakening and that comes from experiencing love for yourself and everyone around you," Joe says.
"Awakening is to realise that you are the universe." hurts you, but if you look at it from a stage four perspective, you realise this is a part of a journey and it has served you in getting to a place where you can awaken.
"If I had not had the difficult experiences in my life, I may not have learned what I did and grown and expanded to a place of awareness where I have more control. The idea is to accept those experiences, rather than reject them.
"Awakening is when you look back at your life and your life's journey and know that it was all good and you have no regrets; you've forgiven yourself and everybody else and it's served its purpose to bring you to where you are now."
Awakening is about experience, about observing what goes on around you. It is to realise that everything you want is here in this moment.
"My own life has been a process of awakening and that is no different for anybody," Joe says.
"If anybody reads my books they will be able to map out my journey of consciousness. The first books were about marketing and sales and copywriting and they came from the perspective that you are not a victim and you can make money. When I wrote The Attractor Factor it was representative of me being in stage two, the empowerment stage. Then I wrote Zero Limits because of the therapist I had met who had healed an entire ward of mentally ill criminals without doing anything except surrendering. So I learnt about surrendering just by writing the book. Then I kept working on myself and had satori experiences, which is many moments of awakening which led me to believe in the fourth stage of permanent awakening where the ego dissolves. I've discovered this because I've been living it.
"For me mapping has made things easier. I believe that the hell I went through in childhood to get to this lifestyle happened because I was going to be the guy to map out the four stages of Awakening."
Buddha says the secret to existence is to have no fear. It is fear that holds us back from awakening, but once the realisation occurs that at the heart of awakening is the essence of self and being at peace with yourself and therefore the universe then fear is a past experience.
"Unconditional love is the term that would sum up the awakening and that comes from experiencing love for yourself and everyone around you," Joe says.
"Awakening is to realise that you are the universe."
www.JoeVitale.com. Awakening Course is available at http://www.awakeningdownload.com
