Week 15 – Insight

Let’s talk about insight. I looked at the Master Keys before this course began. It’s a free download from Amazon, you know. I hadn’t picked up on Og Mandino as a course material, but I saw something about the Master Keys, and I’d heard something about Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich. Heck, I can read. I could do this stuff myself. I didn’t have to pay big bucks from someone to teach me. Yeah, I know they said the course was free with a “Pay-It-Forward” scholarship, but I knew at some point, I’d be asked to pay it forward or leave. And how much would they want me to pay forward? I didn’t like the secretiveness of that. But I’d known the person I was following who was recommending the course for many years (electronically — we’ve not met in person yet), so I trusted her when she said it wasn’t outrageous. And, please, if you know me at all, you can trust me that if you choose to apply for a scholarship in the next class, you can afford to Pay-It -Forward when they finally get around to asking you to.  And if you’re not willing to do so by the time they ask, you’re not getting value from the course for you anyway, so don’t worry about it.  I poked at the materials, but they didn’t look inspiring. I knew I wouldn’t do it on my own, and the other people going through the the course with me might be useful, so I decided to dive in.

That’s a very long way of saying, I’m finding the Master Keys portion of the course not only intriguing but valuable. Last week, we focused on Harmony. This week, we focus on Insight. We study more about the laws under which we live. In the intro, we learn we “gain strength in proportion to the effort expended, and that our happiness is best attained through a conscious cooperation with natural laws.”

It’s fully within our power to place ourselves in harmony with the laws and experience a life of relative peace and happiness. But if we lack something, we cannot obtain what we need if we cling tenaciously to what we have (15-5). We also must remember that all conditions and experiences come to us for our benefit. (Amazingly, this is fully in line with this month’s Scroll IV, p. 71-72, “…I know a great secret of life for I perceive, at last, that all my problems, discouragements, and heartaches are, in truth, great opportunities in disguise.”

It’s both troubling and freeing to realize that everything we experience happens for a reason. For the Biblical scholars, think Ecclesiastes. It’s challenging to realize these things are for our BENEFIT, especially when we are in the midst of whatever it may be.

We reap what we sow, painful as that may be to digest. But we can change what we sow. 15-10 says, “In order to possess vitality thought must be impregnated with love. Love is a product of emotions. It is therefore essential that the emotions be controlled and guided by the intellect and reason.”

A few paragraphs later, we are reminded if we want desirable conditions, we can only afford to entertain desirable thoughts.

This is why I took this course, and I have to attest these statements are true. I was thinking undesirable thoughts about my husband, and it wasn’t helping our marriage. My husband loves me. He’d been making every effort to address my concerns, yet I was still unhappy with him. The more unhappy I became with him, the worse I thought of him. He was the same guy he always was — the guy I was very happy to marry. I was thinking differently about him. Through applying the insights gained from this course, I’m happy to say I’m thinking mostly happy thoughts about him now, and I’m chasing the less than happy thoughts away quickly.

We must use the insight we’ve gained to ensure the thoughts we entertain contain no mental, moral, or physical germ which we do not wish to have objectified into our lives.