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Mike
Dooley
My
Time
and
Space
I used to think everyone knew something that
I didn’t. They, like I, weren’t aware of
what it was, and they didn’t seem to
notice that I was without it, but to me the
difference was painful. Life’s “little
things” seemed second nature to others,
whereas I felt I had to fake that I knew
what was going on. I felt awkwardly
different, which led to an overwhelming
desire to question the things that most
people seem to take for granted. A burning
desire to know what this life is about,
which I have now largely satisfied, making
the price of my sensed alienation very small
in comparison.
For
me, in the beginning, my search for answers
generally centered around the issues of
life, death, and the powers of the mind, but
within these there were many other topics
like time, space, heaven, hell, hypnosis,
UFO’s, ghost stories, ESP, the dream
state, reincarnation, etc. I had arrived at
several basic conclusions for each, but they
were just hunches. Without knowing how I
knew, for example, at the
age of 12 or 13 I remember telling my
mother that space and time couldn’t really
exist, and that neither could hell, or a God
that wasn’t One with all things, living
and inanimate. I reasoned that He was not
just inside Us all, but that
no part of our
experience could ever be anything less than
100% God.
I
didn’t realize it at the time but my
desire to “know” had put me on an inner
path of understanding, or better my thinking
was beginning to attract like thinking. As
if my questions were slowly answering
themselves, opening my eyes to the insights
that are latent in us all. As I walked this
path the questions I dwelled upon were
somehow answered. I was never sure just when
the answers had
arrived. I only sensed, sometime after
“illumination”, that an intuitive
knowing had been imparted when I wasn’t
paying close attention.
The
first time I remember physically pursuing my
fascinations with life’s mysteries was at
the age of 14. Hypnosis was an exciting and
bizarre affair I thought, so I checked some
books out from my high school’s library,
and bought a few short “how to” ones of
my own. In very little time I was
successfully hypnotizing some of the younger
neighborhood kids who looked to me with some
authority, but it all became very boring
when I ran out of ideas of what to say or do
once my subjects had gone under. My favorite
tricks like having their fingers go numb so
that their big brothers could prick them
with pins, telling them that they could no
longer open their eyes, or having them blurt
out nonsense when given post-hypnotic
triggers, lost their appeal. No one had bad
habits to break, and I had no success with
anyone my age or older.
Exploring
hypnosis I gleaned several breakthroughs.
First that the process worked, I saw the
mind’s influence over the body and its
thoughts, and second, while rummaging in the
school library I discovered The
Search for Bridey Murphy, by Morey Bernstein.
It blew my 9th grade mind. I couldn’t
understand why everyone didn’t have a
copy, or why the teachers and adults I knew
hadn’t heard of it. Surely, I thought,
this was revolutionary material that should
be studied and queried by the greatest minds
of the world. But as far as I knew that
hadn’t happened since Bridey’s
publication in 1956. Nevertheless, the
paranormal events and conditions described
in Bridey made perfect sense to me,
paralleling many of my own inner suspicions,
and opening doors in my thinking that
enabled me to ponder even greater questions.
Although
raised a church-going Catholic I found many
of their teachings, rules and rituals
contradictory, and more importantly,
inconsistent with the answers I had
intuitively arrived at. I’ve always
believed, for example, that each of us is
really doing our best given our own
understandings, therefore if judgment were
to be passed on a life, and I don’t
believe it is, sin would only ever be
regarded as an honest “mistake” due to
deep misunderstandings. Not a demerit system
that leads to eternal damnation. Wouldn’t
a loving Father, I reasoned, have more
compassion than to seek revenge on his
comparatively feeble children who are
temporarily blinded by the illusions
they’ve created? Even human parents are
far more understanding of their own flesh
and blood than the "Father"
as portrayed in most religions.
Sin, and its past and present connotations,
must have been a term derived by man I
concluded, not an understanding, all-knowing
God.
I’ve
always needed explanations that made sense,
and just as importantly, I believed they
were attainable. I came to deduce, and still
believe, that Jesus was here to tell us, as
others have, that we are all “children of
God”, that the things he did, we all can
do, and that there are no sins, no evil, no
hell, other than what exists in our own
minds. He came to Earth to be a living
example of these teachings, to show a better
way to his fellow travelers at a dark time
in history when limiting beliefs were so
ingrained into the population they no longer
sought, nor could they conceive of, greater
thinking.
Despite
my early quest for hypnosis books, I’ve
never been a “reader”. Since attending
college I’ve probably averaged only 1-2
new books a year. So it’s ironic that over
my life, several books, or authors, have
helped define my own thoughts, and therefore
my life, in the most profound ways.
With
few exceptions, these books were introduced
to me by my mother, who has always been an
avid “reader” and who I’ve always been
very close to. I was 15 when, as a budding
tennis hopeful on the state juniors’
circuit, she gave me The
Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey
and Psycho-Cybernetics,
Maxwell Maltz. Both of which improved my
game immeasurably, and further peaked my
interest in the powers of the mind over our
lives. I haven’t read either since the
year I carried them everywhere, but I recall
that their gist was to unleash the power of
imagination so as to influence the course
you’d like your game, or life, to take.
During
my freshman year at the University of
Florida the pitch in my desire for
“understanding” was its greatest,
overshadowing everything else I did or
thought. For the entire year I dwelled daily
on the meaning of life, and the mystery of
death, but to no visible avail. Then, out of
nowhere, Mom sent another book, The
Silva Mind-Control Method, by Jose Silva.
Once again I was pondering the untapped
abilities of my mind,
and felt a renewed excitement for the
mysteries it contained. But before I had
time to finish it another book arrived, the
first in a series, that illuminated the
darkest corners of my mind. Written with a
clarity and depth unlike anything I’d ever
read, it confirmed, without exception, my
deepest feelings and intuitions about life.
It put my abstract thoughts into words and
filled the gaps inbetween.
As I finished each I felt that my almost
desperate searching was coming to an end. My
questions were either answered, or by then
seemed at least, very answerable. These
books contained the “Seth
Material” as dictated by the late Jane
Roberts, 1929-1984, in Elmira, New York.
With
my own inner search no longer lost in space
I began to use and apply the understandings
that were solidified by the Seth Material
without any looking back. With the answers
to my fundamental questions revealed, the
focus of my life has become the application,
or the living, of the truths I’ve found -
a mighty tall, but rewarding, order. Today
it's through the pursuit of my goals and
dreams that I learn my lessons and even
greater secrets about life and myself.
As
far as fun and meaning go in my life today,
by most standards I've been doing pretty well.
After graduating with a degree in accounting
I joined the most prestigious of the then
“Big Eight” accounting firms. Before
long I was "selectively
transferred"
into their exclusive tax department
(that's a doozy of a story you can hear about
in my audio recordings!), which led
to my acceptance of a “tour of duty” in
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. From Riyadh, I
traveled extensively around the world,
fulfilling a goal with uncanny accuracy,
that I had written down less than 2 years
earlier; in my travels I visited 17
countries, most in Africa, Asia and the Far
East, and I remember being blown away by my
surroundings one morning during breakfast at
the Regent Hotel in Kowloon, overlooking the
island of Hong Kong - realizing how I had
visualized the exact same
"picture", hardly 24 months
earlier, based on a glossy advertisement in a
magazine like Architectural Digest.
When
the tour in Riyadh was complete I chose to
repatriate in Boston where
I continued excelling in the firm's
international tax department. I stayed there
for almost 2 years before deciding it was
time to try some new challenges. To be
closer to family I moved to Orlando,
Florida, and from there I decided to pursue
another dream, starting my own company. Only
problem was... I had no idea what kind of
company I wanted to own, or where to begin.
Within
a few months I
joined talents with those of my artistic
brother, and managerial mother, and we
launched, from scratch, TUT®,
Totally Unique T-shirts®.
One million T's, 3
books, and an audio program later, TUT®
has evolved into today's Totally Unique
Thoughts®
and the web site now before you.
My
understandings have helped as much in other
areas of my life from relationships to
material possessions, and they continue to
grow with their own momentum. I'm still a
student, but also my own teacher, and in
this journey I’ve begun to realize that as
much as I enjoy thinking and living my
thoughts, I enjoy sharing them too... and
learning from others... which I expect, is
at least part of the reason, that our paths
have crossed here and now, you and I.
Thanks
for coming by, keep in touch, and tallyho...
Mike Dooley,
July 06, 2007
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