When The Student is Ready.....
Last weekend I had the privilege of attending Harv Eker's "Millionaire Mind Intensive" in Los Angeles. It was a nice, quiet three days, just me and 2,399 other screaming maniacs playing at a level 10 from morning to night. You see, Harv knows how to create and maintain energy in a room, and that's good, especially when the room is pretty big!
I did notice one unusual behavior pattern in some of the other participants, though. We had quite a few interactive processes where we paired up with other people, and I noticed several of my partners completely ignored the instructions. These processes were all designed to help us identify and replace old limiting beliefs about success and money, and by ignoring the instructions and going off on their own tangent, these participants were sabotaging themselves.
Now why would anyone spend good money to go and lock themselves in a giant room for three days and then work hard to see that they didn't get full benefit out of it? The answer, I think, is fear. Fear of exposing and confronting uncomfortable or painful feelings; fear of re-experiencing painful situations. Sometimes we are terribly frightened by what we think is locked inside us.
I call it a "Wizard of Oz" experience. You remember in the movie how all the characters were so intimidated by the loud, booming voice of "The Great Oz", but when they looked behind the curtain it was a different story. That's kind of how it works with our old memories and feelings. They can seem real scary to us because we acquired most of them as children and there is a lot of emotion attached. But the good part is that when we bring them out to the light of day, their power over us evaporates.
I felt bad for these people who were too frightened to confront their own feelings even when they knew in their own mind that these old beliefs were what had them stuck. We all know the old saying about "when the student is ready, the teacher appears." Well, what I saw was that when the student isn't ready, the best teacher in the world can't do squat.
So, are we teachable? Do we have the courage, today, to be teachable? Because it does take courage. The answer to this question makes all the difference in the world to the only person who matters - us!
Running Out of Oil? Not!
In "The Science of Getting Rich", Wallace Wattles says, "Nature is an inexhaustible supply of riches. The supply will never run short. The visible supply is practically inexhaustible. And the invisible supply really is inexhaustible."
Now, that's a pretty bold statement. Can it be true? Since the news media would have us believe that we are running out of oil, maybe that would be a good test case to see if Wattles knows something that they don't.
First, the invisible supply. This one is easy. This is the supply of energy out of which everything is made. A recent survey of the cosmos added up all the mass that could be found - all the galaxies, star systems, black holes and other "stuff" - and compared it to the energy calculated to have been released by the "Big Bang". Surprisingly, they found that only 4% of the energy has showed up as "stuff" in the cosmos, leaving 96% left over, enough for 25 more universes!
Well, that might technically not be "inexhaustible" but it's close enough.
So what about the visible supply - the energy that's already hydrocarbons, like oil, coal and natural gas? This gets a little more complex, because there are 3 elements - price, distribution systems, and supply. Some deposits of oil and gas are cheaper to develop. Some distribution systems already exist. A disruption in this existing system can look like we're running out of supply, and the media doesn't know the difference.
The oil fields that we currently use are only one type of deposit. They are relatively cheap to develop and easy to refine, so that's what we use. It may be that world demand will grow to the point that these easy deposits won't be enough. But that doesn't mean there isn't any more.
In Canada, there is a hydrocarbon deposit called the Athabasca Tar Sands. The oil there is gooey and harder to handle and refine, and there is no distribution/refining system tailored to it yet, but there is a lot of it! Actually, the estimates are that this deposit is equal to 3 Saudi Arabias! Imagine that, right next door. There are deposits almost as large in Venezuela and Russia, too. When these all come on line, they have the potential to dwarf the production of the Mideast.
A similar situation exists in natural gas. We're told that we're running out of it, but actually we're just exceeding the capacity of the current distribution system. A recent article detailed the discovery of enormous quantities of methane gas (hydrates) trapped in sea floor sediments and in permafrost. A pilot project has demonstrated the feasibility of the production of gas from these deposits, but there's no distribution system yet.
How much methane is there? Well, the article said that only 1% of the estimated supply would meet the needs of the USA for about 170,000 years! I think that qualifies as "practically inexhaustible", don't you?
So we have found that we have the equivalent of about 9 Saudi Arabias in tar sand oil, and enormous quantities of natural gas in hydrate deposits. Yes, there's some engineering and distribution work to do, but we're good at that. Looks like we're not running out of oil after all.
Oh, did I mention that some of the oil fields that were thought to have been pumped dry are refilling slowly from below? Geologists are somewhat mystified by this development and there are a number of theories why this is happening. (Wallace Wattles would not have been surprised.) One of the most controversial theories was proposed by brilliant physicist Thomas Gold, who proposed that oil is not decaying dinosaurs. as we have been taught, but the product of a massive methane-based biosphere beneath the Earth's crust. If Gold is right, we've only scratched the surface of the oil supply.
Of course, Gold might be wrong. But those pesky oil fields are still refilling from somewhere.
Moral of this story: don't believe everything you hear on the 6pm news.
Moral #2: "Nature is an inexhaustible supply of riches. No person, therefore, is poor because nature is poor, or because there is not enough to go around." - Wallace Wattles
