Master Key Exerience Week 8: Uncanny

“Uncanny” is the word that summarizes the week for me, a week of being an observer of my thoughts, my life, and my future. The dictionary says that “uncanny” means “strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.”

Unsettling the subconscious (Subby) has been the goal from Day 1. Everything in the Master Key Experience is working together to do that. We write on cards. We put colored shapes next to promises on the cards, identify those shapes in the world as we go through our day, and then associate those shapes to the parts of our written Definite Major Purpose statement to Subby. We repeat what’s on the cards, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud. We are encouraged to read everything once a day or several times a day with “EN-THUUUUUUUUUUUUUS-IASM”–the cards, our statement to Subby, the Bluprint declaration that builds confidence, the Scroll and/Verity for the week/month, and the phrases “I can be what I will to be!” and “Do It Now!” We were told to create a movie trailer and then a movie poster, anchoring our Definite Major Purpose in images as vivid as we can make them. We were told to read our DMP aloud with our favorite emotive music in the background, record it, and listen to it repeatedly, especially when Subby is most susceptible at bedtime and first thing in the morning.

Then greater shakeups came. We started being an observer during Election Week in the U.S. when we were assigned a NO OPINION week. What a heated time to be doing that! How incredible it became to realize halfway into what I was saying or thinking that I was expressing an opinion–and needing to pause and restate so it wasn’t an opinion. I’ve never thought of myself as being excessively opinionated, so the repeated proof that I am definitley opinionated was at first shocking and then quite funny. “Oh no! Not again.” Over and over. I got good at switching the subject in a conversation when I couldn’t come up with anything to say that was not an opinion. My contribution to conversations started being facts or asking questions or listening. Before saying anything I’d quickly assess whether I’m an expert on the topic and allowed to have an expert opinion or not. A couple of weeks into not expressing opinions I asked in class if this is an exercise that will end, or is it an ongoing thing? News coverage and personal debates raged across the country about whether the election had been rigged or not. As a self-described news junkie and trained debater I so desperately wanted it to be an exercise that would end. “Let me ask you this,” Mark Januszewski, one of our instructors said. “How do you feel when you’re not always expressing opinions and judgments?” “Peaceful!” I replied quickly, suddenly realizing the deep truth of that. “Why would you not want to keep doing it?” he asked. I was stunned. This really IS a new way of being in our world, in my world. So I reluctantly wrote into my DMP that one of the things I will sacrifice to achieve my goals is my constant news checking from first thing in the morning to the last thing at night. I will stop triggerng all kinds of judgments and opinions that way, yet stay informed by checking once a day while unplugging the rest. I realized all that time immersing myself in news and opinion was getting in the way of my better future…

Then this week we were given still other ways to be an observer. We were told to turn off TV and screens for the next months to give ourselves mental space and quiet to think. We were assigned a 7-Day mental diet of thinking positively. The object is to string together 7 days of no negative internal thoughts or negative external words. If I observe negativity I must go back to Day 1. I thought this would be easy. After all, when I’d signed up to be on the waiting list for the MKE I had downloaded a document that introduced me to the 7-day mental diet and Emmett Fox, its creator. Back in the summer I did quite well with it, easily stringing together 7 days and enjoying watching my thoughts and words and reframing them. Now I realize that I had been on the shallow end of the pool that week!

Eight weeks into this experience of learning better and better how to be an observer I am having a much harder time stringing together 7 days because I’m more awake, more aware, and much more informed about the consequences of negative thinking. I had missed so much of my negativity that first time! This week I have discovered how often I turn really harsh negative thoughts and judgments on myself and my performance and how often I judge myself a failure. I’m not as self-disciplined and as positive as I had thought I was. Feeling like the failure I observed I was telling myself I was, I came close to despair and close to quitting the Master Key Experience. Can I really give up the news and opinions and TV and screens that have been so much a part of my life? Even my DMP wasn’t feeling right so I hadn’t yet done the assigned poster nor the assigned audio based on it. I seriously doubted that my DMP was possible to achieve. Isn’t it too grandiose? How dare I? I didn’t turn in a revision on time. In turmoil, I started skipping some daily practices and broke my perfect record in the MKE app and went down to 69% compliance.

That’s when the uncanny breakthroughs came tumbling in. In my weekly sharing with her last Saturday, my accountability partner told me I’m way too hard on myself–“Please look at how all the positives far outweigh the negatives! Keep going.” Just 10 minutes later, my business support group used those same words and I wept hearing again that I’m way too hard on myself. “Let it go! You can and will do this!” they said in one way or another one after the other. On Sunday in our weekly class we were reminded of Coach Wooten and how it’s the little things perfected and practiced daily that underpin success. I saw clearly that my having gotten out of the daily routines of reading silently and aloud the cards and assignments had opened me up to doubt and fear and that at this point in the journey I was not strong enough to skip anything. Then the 3rd Verity this week was all about limiting beliefs: “Limiting beliefs are all that stand between the 13 riches, my intention and myself.” The accompanying exercise of walking 4 minutes with pebbles in my shoe, and 4 minutes without, daily brought astonishing “felt” realizations about what repeated negative thinking could do in a life to make us focus so much on the negative that there’s no room for the positive. Lesson 8 told me “It is evident therefore that we are to hate nothing, not even the ‘bad,’ because hatred is destructive, and we shall soon find that by entertaining destructive thought we are sowing the ‘wind’ and in turn shall reap the ‘whirlwind.'”

With new-found strength, confidence, and determination, on Thursday I tackled another rewrite of my DMP. This time I sat in the upholstered rocker in my bedroom where I usually read the exercises and do the daily sit. I used a pen to revise and reassemble, somehow connecting with the words and intentions better, letting my imagination work as I had in the daily sit. When I brought it to the computer to type up, the most uncanny thing yet happened. We’re allowed 400 words, and as I typed, I’d keep looking down to the word total everytime I deleted words or phrases and replaced them. EVERY SINGLE TIME I REVISED, the total word count was exactly 400–EVERY SINGLE TIME more than 10 times in a row no matter what I changed! We were told to watch for things like this. I had come across a quote last week that “Coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous.” Wow. And again, humbly, wow.

Finally my DMP feels right, feels like me, feels like the most exciting and wonderful challenge of my life for which I am willing and determined to master every part I’m taught to get me there. I’m back to perfect compliance.

Absolutely uncanny.