We are gods with amnesia. Near-death experiencer Jan Price says, “Born of God, we are spirit, and cannot be anything else. All is mind—one mind. We are that mind asleep—yet awakening, and God is that mind eternally aware.”8 Jesus said, “Lest ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe” (John 4:48). Miracles, though fascinating and inspiring, are only performed by saints and sages to awaken belief. The miracles of the saints and sages are strong prods to our sleeping memories of our divine nature. Their purpose is not to entice us to want to perform miracles ourselves, but to awaken us to our divine potential, to shake us out of our amnesia-induced conviction that we are merely physical bodies and that this physically manifesting cosmic movie is the only reality. Even when we realize we have amnesia, however, even when we believe in the power of our own thought, we will not be immediately able to use its power consciously. Not until we have mastered the exacting mental discipline practiced by the saints and sages will we, like these great ones, be able consciously to use our thoughts to change the hidden, nonlocal energy template and thus the physical world. Further, our existing convictions run deep into our nonlocal subconscious. Merely thinking with the conscious mind that one has blue eyes instead of brown is not going to overcome the much more powerful conviction—lying deep, and all but inaccessible, in the nonlocal subconscious mind—that one has brown eyes. We hold our convictions so deeply that even when they make us miserable we cannot easily change them. Being told that a problem is all in the mind is no help at all—as a wise man said, “That’s jolly well the worst place for it to be.” Our deeply held thoughts are like girders that hold together the structure of our being. And like steel girders, our thought girders are immensely strong. The exacting discipline undergone by the saints and sages to achieve such profound mental control begins with direct experience of one’s subtle, nonmaterial, divine nature. Intellectual belief in our higher potential, our divine nature, is a starting point, but belief is not enough to change deeply held convictions that the physical world is fixed, immutable, and separate from ourselves. Direct inner experience attained through practicing the disciplines of the science of religion, on the other hand, will transmute those deeply held convictions of materiality by enabling us directly to experience the subtler, interconnected, nonmaterial reality of energy and thought.
Joseph Selbie
The Physics of God