By Goethe:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans, that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.

And then there are these words used by Abraham Lincoln:
Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality.
It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions.
And the actions which speak louder than the words.
It is making the time when there is none.
Coming through time after time after time, year after year after year.
Commitment is the stuff character is made of; the power to change the face of things.
It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism.

In Chapter 1, we laid out a Quick Start Guide for those of you who wanted the short version of how to take advantage of the Law Of Attraction and change your lives. In summary, positive thinking is powerful. If you start from what you’d like to believe about yourself and the world, and then move to hoping to believe ii, and then practice that hope into choosing to actually believe it, you will step into that version of reality. What you choose to believe, becomes.

Then there are those of you who want to know more about how it works, and Chapters 2 through 5 are the longer story about who you are, why you’re here, and how you create everything in your experience. Now we know that while the concepts in those chapters are simple, they’re also radical in many ways because these ideas are upside down from the way you’ve been used to thinking about your world. So in the remaining chapters our intent is to answer many of your common questions, and, even more importantly, give you the keys to success.

The four keys to conscious creation are:
1. Understanding who you are – Absolute #1 – that you’re a consciousness, timelessly connected to the collective consciousness of Source.
2. Understanding how you create – Absolute #2 – that the belief-choices you make define everything about you and the matching context that surrounds you.
3. Learning some tools, processes and techniques that help you to develop new habits of thinking, and we’ll be talking more about these in the next chapter.
4. Making a commitment to change, and to using those tools, and to practicing these new ways pf thinking into every fiber of your being. So let’s spend a little time here in this chapter on the nature of the commitment you must make.

So here you are. You’ve come to the place of understanding who you are and that you create your world by the belief choices you make. The next step in applying that knowledge to creating more of what you want, is to make some new belief choices to override the old choices you’ve spent a lifetime holding onto, and then line up with those choices. “Lining up” means establishing those new beliefs at all levels within you, and it’s an essential part of the creative process. Choosing to believe that your natural state is abundance will not launch you into the prosperity that is yours for the asking as long as you subconsciously still believe that “money doesn’t grow on trees”.

So now the task is to unlearn what is “real”. You have to unlearn at all levels that there’s a world out there external to you and that you have to deal with it as it is. You have to unlearn that you’re sharing that world with all those people in your life and you have deal with them as they are. And you do that by beginning to line up at all levels with the idea that you’re the creator of it all and you can change any of it. And as you begin that process you’ll find that the “reality” you been accepting as truth, doesn’t give up easily. That subconscious of yours is a faithful servant, and minute by minute, day in and day out, and year in and year out, you’ve been teaching it what’s “real”, and it’s job is to go on supporting you as it always has.

When you woke up this morning, the bed, the floor, the walls, time and gravity and the whole shooting match were there around you, not because you were asleep in an ongoing existing world and simply regained consciousness, but because, and only because, you knew consciously and subconsciously that it would be. It’s that “knowing”, that believing, that creates it. The consciousness that is you contains the tapestry of your expectations, and that tapestry defines the shape of the physical you and the world around you, and by Law Of Attraction you exist moment by moment within the space/time illusion that matches that tapestry.

We know that your world seems real. It’s a very convincing virtual reality. When you bang your knee, it hurts. It’s so self-evidently real that it seems beyond question, but it’s an illusion. You chose to focus into it for the fun of creating this new and exciting adventure, and you’ve become mesmerized by it to the point of forgetting who you are. But even as when you wake up from a dream, you inherently know that the world you’ve re-emerged into is more real than the dream you just left, so it will be that when you transition and wake up from the reality dream, you will know that your new state is more real than the physical world you just left.

But you don’t have to transition to get to that “knowing”. You can begin to know it now. It takes commitment and it takes focus. Think about when you learned to drive a car. Actually you already knew consciously how to drive because you grew up watching people do it. It’s just that you’d never done it, and when you got behind the wheel for the first time, you discovered that your conscious mind wasn’t capable of processing all the things you need to manage. So, nervously at first, on that deserted stretch of road, you spent hours and hours practicing the basics.

What you were actually doing was teaching your subconscious to drive, and now when you drive to the store and back, you mostly don’t consciously engage with the process of driving at all. Your subconscious drives you in the same way it walks you and it talks you. Some people after having a car accident will be fearful of driving, and they make the mistake of thinking they must drive more consciously. What they discover is that they can’t because there’s just too many things to manage, and until they relax into leaving it once more to their subconscious, driving is a scary thing to do. 99.9% of the decisions you make as you go about this game of yours are made subconsciously.

So you’ve trained your subconscious in the “facts” of life. Now how do you go about making some changes? Let’s continue with our driving analogy, and think about what happens when, for example, you fly from the USA where you drive on the right, to the UK where they drive on the left, and you rent a car. This is not a trivial exercise. Here’s what you’ve got going for you. The steering and the brakes and the accelerator all work as they always have, so most of the driving experience is as it always was. Here’s what you don’t have going for you. You have to drive on the other side of the street, and if you leave everything to your subconscious to handle, you’ll be in trouble.

So what do you do? You commit to the task. You override your subconscious and you focus consciously on just that part of your driving that keeps you on the correct side of the road. It’s difficult to do but it’s possible. As you get into it you have to keep saying no to your subconscious. “That’s not the way we do it here. Here’s where we have to go.” And over time, your subconscious learns a new “reality”, and each day gets a little easier as you relax back into driving as easily as you always have.

And so it is with creating a new life. This is not a trivial exercise. Firstly it helps if you understand consciously who you are and how it all works, because it gives you confidence. There’s nothing wrong with simply following our Quick Start Guide if you’re prepared to take on faith that positive thinking has power. But if you really get the idea that you’re a powerful creator, and the Law Of Attraction is always on, then when you come up against that old persistent thought that you “have to face reality”, you can stare it down and take the steps you need to take to establish those new chosen beliefs within you. It takes commitment. Confidence helps.

And it takes focus and on-going awareness. You can’t do it by your conscious-self alone. Let’s talk a little about that word ongoing. By definition, you can’t do anything ongoingly with conscious thought. Consciously you’re always going to be distracted by the flow of that game you’re in. It’s your subconscious that has the ability to be always “on”, always monitoring and always ready to signal you when it thinks you need to consciously make a decision. As in that London driving example, you will need to be saying to your subconscious – ”That’s not the way we do it anymore. Here’s where we have to go.” You can’t operate in the world without that subconscious of yours being involved.

It’s scary to try to drive by consciously overriding your subconscious. It’s impossible for you to speak coherently while you’re consciously choosing the exact words you want to say, because while you’re focusing on words, you’re incapable of thinking ahead to what you’re want to say next. That’s why so many of you are terrified about the thought of public speaking. With your conscious components being as you’ve designed them to be, your life is a conscious/subconscious partnership. You cannot master this Law Of Attraction stuff unless you engage your subconscious and enroll it as an agent of change rather than simply a faithful maintainer of what-has-always-been.

From those words of Goethe, The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. We say, when you commit yourself to the extent of practicing a whole new pattern of thinking into every level of your beingness, the Law Of Attraction delivers you into a world that matches that pattern. And what that looks like is this. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which [none of you] could have dreamed would have come [your] way.

And we say, amen. We think Goethe had a pretty good grasp on the divine nature of your existence. Changing your life means changing the way you think. In the next chapter we’ll be talking about techniques you can use that can help with those changes. We encourage you to explore. Find the ones that work for you and use them. Adapt them and make then your own, and what you’ll find is that they cease to be techniques and just become, ongoingly, a part of the new you.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.