Throughout these books the question ‘How?’ is a central theme. It is not always asked directly but indirectly what happens within the boundaries of Who? What? Where? Why? and When? is defined by the ‘How?’ it underpins all of them. It is a permanent seam that passes through the various strata that they each represent.

This set of seven books can be seen as a series of guides for those who wish to know more and be better informed about the possibilities that their life represents at more than a merely mundane level. In ancient times the magus would set his spells down in a grimoir that was coveted by the uninitiated. Their students would attempt to summon spirits and cast spells – come on, you’ve seen the Sorcerer’s Apprentice – and become themselves magi of account, necromancers and dealers in matters of mystery.

This isn’t like that at all; the days of hidden knowledge are now passed. The lid has been blown off the esoteric threads of world history by the advent of the Information Age and enough half knowledge, and convoluted misinterpretation has seeped into a domain hitherto alien to it to make containment an irrelevance. The gathering storm in human affairs precludes game playing; the time of fantasy has passed. Significant changes in the criteria that govern human appearance and hold together its expression are happening even as these words are written.

As breath is drawn so the cycles of the Universe move from one octave to the next and already it is late, yesterday’s secrets are today’s lingua franca and tomorrow’s mysteries are yet to appear in the human theatre of occurrences. What if it were the case for the human race that all of a sudden we were told that our time was limited? How would you react? Do this exercise: Take your first reaction and dismiss it, take your second reaction and dismiss it too then consider your third reaction; now we’re getting close. Imagine an angel, an alien or an avatar turned up to you and spoke to you intimately of the state of human affairs, make the messenger important and their message becomes important too, make a note of that third answer, develop your theme from there.

Your life is in your hands, you can consider yourself a surgeon or a decider of fates, it’s up to you but the reality is that you stand there holding your own destiny. What do you want to do with it?

A Principled Response to the Question ‘How?’

We look for formulas, techniques, pithy answers and really there are none. Happiness is not something that can be guaranteed if you do certain things, it isn’t like that. We are each uniquely assembled, from the chromosomes we inherit, to our DNA, to our formation within the three areas of the Fixed, Fluid and Infinite. There is only the one way, and that is your way, which is unique to you, gives succor and nourishment to you and is not replicable in anyone else. Remember the unreliable witness syndrome. We may all see the same thing and the filters that we have between our minds and what happened cause it to be replayed completely differently by all of us. The  art in assimilating the truth of a situation is to place yourself as near to its frequency as possible. It is about meeting the Universe on its terms rather than demanding that it fits into a box that is ‘you’ shaped.

There is no magic formula, but there is guidance that may assist, help and render that which is useful and progressive from any situation. The ‘How?’ of our study by definition requires an answer that can’t be given like a mathematical formula, but in recognition of the enquiry I will offer a set of principles that, if you embody and live them, will keep you forever refreshed and nearby that which is progressive and generative.

1. Attitude is everything.

Live your life with a full heart and approach every situation from the fullness of yourself. You are faced by choices and options every moment of every day of your life and only you can determine the attitude you will bring to bear upon any situation you find yourself in. Do not compare yourself with others, measure yourself only against your best and strive always to be improving. Refinement is a process of many small actions that aggregate over time to represent a huge shift in the capacity of that which seeks to refine. Do not seek the easy option of seeing the bad or negative in things. Yes, life can be tough at times, so what? Will that stop you? Will you permit it to stop you moving forwards, growing, developing and expanding your capacity to integrate with the environment that has made you welcome?

The right attitude is clean, precise and measured. Define the approach you will take to everything, whatever it is. You may fall flat on your face, so get up and keep going. You may feel it’s all too much at times but there is always someone whose situation has been more challenging who has overcome the odds, be that person, inspire those around you, be the one who makes the difference.

Never forget that the most accomplished individual you can think of had or has exactly the same basic equipment as you, they simply used it to the best of their ability. There are no barriers other than those we place before ourselves. Even in the most compromising positions you still have your attitude and that is defined by you. This is not happy clappy sentimentalism, this says: look, the human race is phenomenally resourceful and effective when it needs to be. Feel that need, locate it and let it influence your attitude, become a person of merit and become merit-worthy by improving on what you did yesterday. Compound your development and over time you will become accomplished in ways that you never dared to believe were possible.

Do you think for a moment that the person you thought of as being the most accomplished did not have days when they felt completely inadequate, beset by doubts, fears and bewildered by what they might do or become? Of course they did, but it did not carry the day, something inside them overcame those feelings of inadequacy or whatever they might have been, they saw a need and fulfilled it. They were and are no different to you except in their expression, their desire to accomplish what they did was no more than yours; they simply took that leap and did it anyway. Meet someone remarkable and you will be struck by how ordinary they are once you have gotten to know them, they are just like you, they have simply pushed themselves forward, picked up the baton and run with it. All of which is determined by attitude.

2. Develop a reasoned and healthy gratitude.

Atheist, agnostic, god fearing or otherwise you cannot escape the fact that your life is the result of an effort of immense complexity that you had no part in. You are the beneficiary of the most awe inspiring set of circumstances whose net product has been your life. Do not become blasé or complacent about that. The provenance of its creator is not the issue, the reality of it is and it provides you with the platform upon which you may fashion such a life and existence as you choose to.

It has been said ‘count your blessings’ and do; do this regularly and exercise your faculties to appreciate precisely what it is that you have been given. Your life and its environs are the most incredible of gifts that defy any attempts by words to convey the magnitude of what is being alluded to. All that you have is cause for a gratefulness that you must try to enact within yourlife. You have by a process that may remain enigmatic been thrust into the very crucible of opportunity, the place where true growth may happen and your potential for emancipation is guaranteed.

This is no idle claim but a profound truth that compels you to approach its existence in your life with appropriate regard and respect. Not only for your own situation, but also for the fact that it is the case for each of us. The fundamental approach to any of your contemporaries is first that we are all sister or brother, members of the same great family and subject to the same conditions and criteria that govern our existence.

Demonstrate your gratitude by exercising what you have been given and this is done by personal development – a process of continual and refining progression whose object is becoming true to oneself. This is a lifetime’s work and will make you the most fortunate of individuals as you will discover.

3. Be of Service

It is an incredible position that you find yourself in to have come this far. Inherent within that is a responsibility – being human is a responsible position to occupy anyway – to yourself, to others and to those things that are less fortunate or capable than you.

You are here for a purpose and part of that purpose is to lead by example, develop abilities and broaden the territory that you occupy. Become a mentor to those things that seek guidance and look for role models that they can draw inspiration from. Give gladly of yourself and go the extra mile, do not always count the cost, if you wish to receive then know that also you must give in order to create a space to receive that which is presented to you.

Living within the bars of a cage that you tacitly agree to is not going to help; break out, break free of it and move into a territory that has only been touched lightly by explorers. There is a whole continent that needs to be explored and colonized; this is the purpose of your existence, at one level, to explore and to establish yourself within the unknown.

That is what you were given these incredible gifts for, to use, to push back the boundaries of the human situation with. This is done by refinement of self and by contagion; we pass on the results of what we have accomplished by what we do rather than what we say. Being able to describe what we have done is useful but life is 99% practical, it’s not a talking shop, it’s about doingand being.

4. Understand and know yourself

This is so absolutely fundamental to your appreciation of your life. Ultimately, happiness is a quality that can only come from a thorough understanding of self and this requires deep study of your own ways, programmings and natural inclinations. You have a canvas upon which you may make a mark, it is that elusive quality we call your life and really this is where it all begins and ends. Understand what you are, understand as best you can the human design and try to fulfil that enormous potential.

Assume this is a one shot deal, there are no retakes, there is no dress rehearsal, this is it, the real thing going on now, define yourself by understanding what you are capable of achieving and then apply that into what you do.

5. Approach everything as a learning opportunity

Never ever grow tired of learning. You are never too old to learn and create new pathways within your cognitive structure. It was once thought that after a certain age your brain had done all it could, did not grow, produced no new cells and gradually went into decline. This is now known to not be the case. Your brain regenerates and has the capacity to create new synapses, neural pathways and the framework of new learning up until the time you die whether that is at nine, nineteen or ninety nine.

This should make you stop and think because the implications are staggering. You are never too old to learn, you are never too wise to not be able to refine your appreciation and cognizance of any given thing or set of things. This is part of the misguided human race’s congenital problem, assumption that things have to stay the same, they do not and neither do you.

You are a product of a virile and fecund Universe, you represent it in microcosm and its character defines your being. Embrace it and move forward with it, improve always and approach everything with a fresh pair of eyes knowing that you will be presented with learning opportunities always and that they are vital nutrients in your existential diet.

Dismiss nothing; familiarity is a stifling influence that clutches at the windpipe of your imaginative and cognitive powers. You will become malnourished and die before your time if you allow yourself to become complacent and locked into the imaginary cycle of having reached the end of your capacity to learn, adapt and assimilate new information. Continue to add new ways, new ideas, new frequencies and most importantly of all new states of being to your repertoire. Do not become a one trick pony but remain versatile and open to the possibilities within any situation.

6. Develop an insatiable curiosity and desire to understand the Universe.

Understanding of self is not an isolated process because you exist within a Universe that defines your existence. Equally it is crucial to understand that environment too so make it your business to know everything you can about its history, expression, character, nature, discover its ways and laws and study them until they become an integral part of your own being. The

Universe is a benevolent giver and seeks opportunities to give of itself in the most astounding ways. To fully appreciate this requires a simultaneous development of understanding of self and understanding of Creation.

Develop an insatiable desire to know more and follow the path it leads you along. This is done by appreciating fully the nature of the rewards that are to be had by pursuing this journey in your life.

7. Capture High Grade Material

You will recall how everything exists on a bar, and this is the case for all things. It can be considered that the higher up its bar or the more refined that a particular thing is the energy content within it is greater. Every action, thought, word and so on has an intrinsic value. Make it your objective to deal in the higher or finer grade material. Consider that it leaves a residue or a fingerprint upon your being – it is difficult to describe this thoroughly in this context but a broad appreciation is being offered here – and that your character is thus defined by those things that you have mixed and do mix with. Things go to things, so you will appreciate that the finer your cumulative fingerprint, the finer the matters that present themselves to you will be and the higher the grade of nutrition or raw material plasma that you will process.

This will, no doubt produce questions in you and that is fine, run with them, extend and pursue them, see where they lead you. It is not my objective here to be necessarily elusive but the territory this opens up is huge and really a matter that merits your fullest consideration. The concept is not within the remit of this particular study at anything other than a level that acknowledges its existence.

8. Do as many good works as possible

The world we have inherited is materially competent but at the higher levels it endures in a state of impoverishment. Bringing about change is something that can only be done for real in self but that should not preclude your conscious and mindful input into the world and the human family as an absolute minimum. This does not mean constructing great systems and architecture and socially evolved programs, although it does not exclude them either. It can just as easily be in something as simple as a smile or a greeting, giving sound advice when requested or genuine counsel to someone in a time of need.

These things aggregate at a personal and collective level and become their own genesis of a more evolved process. Remember the principle of things happening in a gradual way, they tend not to happen in one huge paradigm shift but to occur in a tapered way reaching critical mass, bringing about change and then receding having established a new level of process. This is what happens in an omnipresent way within human affairs, there are a seemingly infinite number of cycles being progressed and expediting themselves within the arena of our interactions at many levels.

At any given point in your life and that of the Universe there will be a sequence of cycles reaching their fulcrum, starting, declining, finishing, transforming and so on. It is this that defines the character of a time and originates the uniqueness of every particular moment in the history of an individual, the world, the solar system, the Universe and so on.

These are the matters that we move within and shape our lives, allow yourself to be a force for good and a home to that which seeks the upgrade of human affairs.

9. Do not make unreasonable demands of yourself or others.

Everything you attempt has to be within a framework of what is achievable. Otherwise you are following a recipe for multiple disappointments. Whatever you set yourself the task of achieving be sure that you can see the journey or at least the likely journey you will have to travel in order to accomplish your objectives, no matter how great or small. Allow reason to accompany you on your journey but as a colleague not as your master.

Remember that the Universe itself does not work in a reasonable way and to make reason or logic your god is to align yourself to something alien to Creation. Where reason is invaluable is in its ability to steer you through the madness of the world we have created. A place that tends to be based in coarse lower emotions and the folly of exponential sales or profits. Because of this there is often little in the way of sound structure to those things that implore you to engage with them, they need you more than you need them. This means that you develop a sound appreciation of what you can and can’t do and also of what is appropriate for you and your circumstances at any given time.

10. Nothing happens in isolation

There is a place for everything in everything, interconnectedness to all things. We live in a metaphoric state of appearance that brings us to a focus but is in fact the residual occurrence of the mixing and merging of all things. The Universe in a grain of sand, the greatest motives in the smallest of expressions. Each moment, each happening, each circumstance is the result of an accumulation of momentum that originates from the core of Creation itself. While we may see things in the singular, they are never so. There is always a matrix of causes, arisings, responses, reactions and originating influences at play in everything.

Every thought you have, every idea you have, each new process is the product of a long history of arising. You may be the one who gets a point that generations of your forebears have struggled to grasp, in which case you are the beneficiary of all their efforts. You may be the one who benefits from things that the human family have willed, wished and hoped for. Do not lose sight of the heritage that you stand upon the platform of. You are the product of a myriad range of influences, your lot is to honor what they represent, to progress the best of the marriage between these things and yourself and to carry that forward into the future.

Like the leading edge of a breaking wave you now carry the hope of humanity, whether you drop it like a hot potato or embrace it and hold it close to yourself is your choice. Either way, try to understand the complex sequence of happenings that brought you to this point. Recently a consideration did the rounds, it was posited that a butterfly y in the Amazonian rainforest flaps its wings and the chain reaction of that leads to some apparently unrelated incident on the other side of the planet. This is the latest manifestation of a common understanding within human and planetary affairs. Preceding generations knew that Richard III of England lost his crown for the want of a nail, the domino effect is a commonly understood principle, and things exist within a weave and weft of interconnectedness. Even our genetics are thought to be traceable back to an archetypal Adam and an archetypal Eve some 70,000 years ago; 7,000,000,000 of us all coming from the same forebears.

Nothing happens in isolation, there may be drops of water yet together they form the oceans. Do ants in Australia know that there are ant colonies in Sweden? Of course not but that does not negate the fact of either of them and it is the same with the things that we do not know. Just because we are unaware of them does not say that they do not exist and do not have an effect upon our lives. Know this and be settled to the fact of not knowing all there is to know. We exist within a slither of Creation; consider the visible spectrum, the audible range of acoustics and all of the sensory experiences we may have that are sanctioned by something to happen within a particular range.

Be resolved to expand your territory but also know that you know nothing, you have caught glimpses of a great work in progress and are blessed by your existence but you are not required to put the Universe in a box, resist the temptation to try and do this.

11. Happiness is not a formula

Life is not formulaic, there are laws that govern it but these are omnipotent. Even the genius of our greatest scientific minds tries to assert understanding within the controlled environment of a laboratory. Our lives are not a laboratory for us, they do not exist within isolated and controlled circumstances, rather they occur within a plasmagenic state defined by the inclusiveness of the mix.

True happiness comes from the state of emancipation, of fulfilling the human design and of developing your own latent potential, whatever that may be. There are no value judgments in this, there is no cultural pre-requisite and happiness is not an exclusive property defined by a formulaic grid. When you find out what you want and go for it unconditionally, you will be happy. To those of you privileged enough to be able to do that then you owe it to yourself to try, reward yourself with unconditional opportunity and seize the moments as they happen.

12. Human life is a multi dimensional occurrence

There are layers and depths to your existence that transcend basic understanding. You are the confluence of a life force and a variety of unique propositions that make your existence an unreplicated appearance within the Universe. Love the fact of this and honor it, try to be a great man or woman in your own way and build a structure in your life that is like the greatest architecture, at once inspiring and slightly overwhelming. This can be done; the secrets of the ways and means to achieve phenomenal success in your life have been laid out before you in multiple ways within this study. Seek assistance where you can and accept guidance where appropriate. Consider your life as your project, your unfinished symphony and apply yourself to its fulfillment as though it were the most important thing that you had ever stumbled across.

What you have awareness of is not all that you are. There are multiple systems active and passive within your life whose sovereignty is not compromised by your ongoing affairs. You carry them almost as passengers and they await their time patiently, they will emerge as shoots in the garden respond to the call of spring. Your job is to discover what the call of spring is for a human being.

13. Have no fear of Creation

Many of us do not do things because we fear the consequences. Sometimes we are as afraid of success as we are of failure but the result is the same: we do nothing when something is called for. Shake yourself free of inertia and do things, do not, as the saying goes, hide your light under a bushel.

What is the worst that could happen? And it probably won’t. In my travels I encountered many adventures and found myself in situations that studied in isolation and with hindsight were truly horrendous but I survived. My love of the Universe taught me that it will always provide, it will provide answers and solutions to the greatest challenges and dilemmas providing you are open to engage. It will nourish you always and grant you succor in your darkest hours, know this and you will be able to confront the greatest of your demons and treat the most impossible situations as something to be dealt with rather than run away from. Have no fear of a Universe that has invested its greatest treasure in you and is therefore committed to providing you with safe passage.

You are loved and nurtured, valued and regarded more highly by Creation than possibly you can comprehend at this time and it will never abandon you. Have no fear; you have all that you need to accomplish all you are compelled to strive for. Development in part is about accepting that the unfolding of your life will be like a handful of magic beans sprouting but whose nature can only be guessed at. Remember young Jack, the fool who traded his cow for a bag of magic beans? When they sprouted he had the option to ignore them but he chose to explore what grew out of the beans.

Consider that this, like all folk and fairy stories, is a metaphor. Each day in our lives we face the option of trading a perfectly good cow for a set of illogical magic beans and the more sensible we become the more cows we accumulate and the less concerned we are with magic beans. The central message within the tale is that the beans were the key to young Jack’s destiny; the seemingly worthless beans actually held a proposition that was beyond estimation and propelled him into a situation way beyond that which he understood.

Don’t be afraid of the unknown, that which we know is sufficient to keep us where we are but where we are is stuck on the road to somewhere better.

We need, you need, to get moving.

14. Develop an unshakeable will

When you decide what you want, when it resonates with your whole being like a sharp crack on a frosty morning, do not be put off . Pursue your goals relentlessly. Winston Churchill in his hour of greatness pledged ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ to his appointed task. I do not wish to gild the lily but would suggest that you take the position to meet your own life with the vigor that Churchill was able to summon and with which he prevailed. When you are called to account, be prepared to stand up for yourself and declare that you did your best. No-one or nothing can ask for more.

© Peter Levine