A Former Atheist's Guide to Awakening (7-Steps)- Ray Catania

From the time I'm born to this point, my life is chaos. Complete, undeniable chaos. So chaos became my comfort zone. Can you imagine? I was comfortable in chaos. I was not comfortable with normalcy. So if things were normal, I had to screw them up quickly to get back to chaos. Because I understand chaos. I understand, I know that very well. I know how to navigate those waters. I know how to manipulate those waters. Hell, I can do anything in chaos. By the time I was 25, I had endured abuse, physical and emotional. I had been beaten within interest of survival. I had been shot at more than once. Multiple automobile crashes that should have led to my death. At least one alcohol poisoning that I can recall. And an actual death which was caused by the fire in my home. Actually, it was caused by the gas fumes that I inhaled which triggered the fire later on. That was the nde. I was committed to exercising my self destructive behavior because that's what was programmed into me. That's what I was shown that life was supposed to be. I didn't know anything to be different. And that brings us to the first of the seven takeaways I'm going to share with you today. Number one, it's our programming. You've got to realize that you were programmed incorrectly. And I guarantee to some degree you were. Because we're thousands of generations or thousands of years away from the beginning. So some pretty bad fucking habits were picked up along the way and they were given to you. And you carry them and you give them to your kids and so on. So that has to be broken. I'm not saying chaos was your comfort zone, but I lived. And so I had to continue it and continue it and continue it. Because until you alter or change the program, it doesn't change. The computer will do the same thing. The computer is now your brain. And until you reprogram the computer, it's going to do the same thing every day. More alcohol, poison, more gunshots, more this, more that. More all the bad shit that you're trying to get away from and you go away. Why does it keep happening to me? It's not happening to you. You're bringing it to you. Nothing actually does ever happen to you. You call it forth, In fact, from the age of two to the age of seven. The mind or the brain, I should say, in this case. Let's separate the brain and the mind for a moment. The brain is in a state of theta waves. It's a learning state. The theta state, you see, is the second one from the bottom. Delta is Sleeping, you're out. You're in la La land. You're dreaming. One step up. Theta. When you. When and if you've ever been hypnotized, they put you in a theta state. Why do you suppose they did that? It's the way we can program. You want to quit smoking? Have a hypnotist put you in a theta state. Have them tell you how much you hate smoking. And then you come out. And it works for a minute in one shot. Sometimes it takes ten, but it works. And it works because the hypnotist is speaking directly to the subconscious mind, not your conscious mind and not your egoic mind. It passes all the filters and gets right into where it needs to go. The subconscious mind. The subconscious is connected directly to your unconscious, which contains your emotions as emotional creatures. When something from the subconscious, any experience meets an emotion in the unconscious, that's your truth for the rest of your life unless you change it. That's your programming. Takeaway number two, the power of the mind. We have power of mind because we can change it. I learned. For me, it was extremely important for things to happen the way they did. The trauma, the isolation, everything. Because it led me to this moment right here, where I was able to share this with other people. If it didn't happen, I wouldn't be here. I'm not standing up here being, oh, I'm a victim. No, those are the best days of my life. The worst days of my life were the best because I'm here because of death. That's it, plain and simple. I ain't special. I'm not chosen. I'm not smarter than you, nothing. I've just been through certain things and figured them out for what really are and had some great teachers along. So to experience an awakening of consciousness and get closer to enlightenment, I believe there's many awakenings on road to enlightenment, by the way. One must experience all emotions on the scale of emotions, every vibration that exists. Some of them can only be brought on by trauma and suffering. And if that's not what you want to hear, I'm sorry, but you will not be enlightened or awakened or anything else if you don't know what it's like to feel some real fucking pain. You can't be enlightened if you've only experienced half of a life. So what did that mean for me? I was experiencing the worst half, not the good stuff, right? I was missing the good stuff. So my half was the chaotic half. What I did not have was the love point. That is What I was missing. If you are familiar with Eckhart Tolle, you know that he was homeless and suicidal when he was awake. If you are familiar with the story of the Buddha, then you know that he was pampered. From the day he was born. He knew that he had to leave his father's castle and have nothing, no food, no water, no clothes, no nothing for years and years and years and years to reach enlightenment. He had not suffered. You don't suffer, you don't get there. So I was missing the goods. I had already had myself fair share. I mean, there was more to come, and I'm sure there still is. And I'm not enlightened by any means, but I'm getting there. But I was missing love. And then she showed up. I saw me. I twin flame. That'll bring us to our third takeaway. What is consciousness? Consciousness can be called your spirit, it can be called your soul, it can be called your mind, it can be called your brain. It's consciousness and it's an energy that runs through your being. It's the energy created by your mind, by your brain. The brain creates it, but the mind controls the brain. In fact, the mind is the boss of everything. Everything that is you and everything that's around you. It's very, very powerful. And it can affect others, but it definitely will affect you. It will determine the rest of your life. The good news is you can alter it, you can change it and change your programming. It's never too late. Never too late. I didn't find that love was almost 50 years old. I was incomplete. And it wasn't going to get better. I had made some progression, bar. Got my shit together, went to rehab, had some kids, got married. I was getting there, but I didn't really know what I was doing. It was when I found what I was missing and I found what I needed that everything started to open up. It's a very special relationship that you have, the mind and the brain. In the very first textbooks, the medical journals going back to, I believe it's the 1500s. We had six senses in those journals, not five. Okay? The sixth one was your consciousness. And the church didn't like it that way. They said, well, that sounds like our spirit, our soul. You're talking about our stuff now. Don't talk about our stuff and your silly scienceness. We're above you. We are better than you. Get that out of there. And they did. They cut a deal. They said, okay, we will keep five. A lot of people had to die for that to happen. But the church fully understandable. Our consciousness is the energy. That is the mind, not the brain. Brain is nothing but an organ and the mind is the energy exerted from it. If you believe as I do, then, you know, thoughts are things and those things are made of energy, like everything else is. They're created by the mind, which is also made up of energy, like everything else. Then energy, that is the mind, must go somewhere when you die because it cannot cease to exist. How do we know that? I am sure it is because everybody knows the first law of thermodynamics. Yeah, sure. Everybody remembers science, right? Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. That is a scientific fact. I didn't make that up. That's legit. There's only a certain amount of energy in the universe. It will never be greater, never be more, never be less. It will only be converted from one form to another. So if your mind is energy, which we already know that it is, it's got to go somewhere when you die. I can share with you my ideas, where I think it goes. I have an idea. It's a hypothesis. I don't know that it's going to win a Nobel Prize anytime soon, but the point is that it's not this realm. I mean, that much we know. But there is a physical place that it will actually go. Again, I am not that smart. I just simply put two and two together. Here is what we got. We got an energy that comes out of our mind that when the body dies, it has to go somewhere. And we have a whole bunch of this energy right here that we do not know where the hell it comes from. Dark energy. In fact, it makes up 69% of the entire universe. That is a whole lot of other beings. You cannot see them. Some of you can. You cannot hear them. Some of you can. You know who you are. I don't have to tell you. And that's where I think they go. Now, I'm not saying that's heaven. I'm not saying it's hell. I'm not saying it's this or that. It just is. After that, I have no idea. Which leads us to our fourth takeaway. The most important thing Tesla has ever told us is pay attention to the secrets of the universe. Because they are energy, frequency and vibration. The mind's energy is something we radiate all day, every day. Each of our personal energies has a resonant frequency. Resonant frequency. What that means is in a state of rest. This vibration flows out of you. And if someone says you have a nice aura about you, what they're saying is that when their energy mixes with your energy, it feels good. You have such a nice energy about you. That's a form of want some entanglement. Because you're not going to be next to each other all the time, but you're going to come in contact with each other and you're going to share some energy. Some of yours goes to him, some his go to you, and then you guys go your separate ways. But guess what? You take a little piece of you or a piece of the other person home with you, depending on the impact I have on you today. You're going to take some of me. You don't have to like it, but it will happen. It could be good, it could be bad, it could be both, but it's happening. If you want to avoid it, then you just need to not tee anybody up or learn how to shield your energy from being penetrated. But I would suggest, as Tesla did, limit your interactions with people with energy that you don't want any part of. If they are filled with negative energy, you're going to get some and you're going to take it home. Kind of works like this. Imagine the universe is the satellite dish and the radio is you. The universe can pick up different vibrations and frequencies and hold them. And if you tune in your radio, you can pull it towards you and then you listen to the music. That's how that. And that is exactly how information travels. It is exactly why the Law of Attraction works. I'm sure everyone's heard of the Law of Attraction, right? I'm very, very popular. Without the Law of Vibration, there would be no law. You need them both. So if I dial my cell phone and I call your number, your phone rings. Why I matched your frequency and you answer and you say, hello. And I say, hello. What you do? How are you? And what happens if I can't maintain that frequency? The call drops, right? So I have to maintain the frequency. People say, why doesn't all of attraction work for me? Because you're not maintaining the frequency needed. We interpret our thoughts into vibration. We send them out as a vibration. We want to think about money. I want money. I want money. I want money. I want money. What you're sending out is I money. I will have an abundance of money. You have a visual of what that money is. You have a visual of what the term is, and you're sending those up in the form of a vibration to match A light vibration. If you do it any other way, it will not work. And you also have to maintain the frequency. If you say, I don't want to be in debt, I don't want to be in debt, I want to be in debt, guess what? You're getting more debt. Because the business visual you just turned into a vibration was one of debt. Maybe it's a picture of a pile of bills however you see it, but that's what you're sending out. The universe will not speak English with you, or Spanish, or Japanese or any anything else. It wasn't none of that shit. It's vibration. Your brain makes the energy, mind makes the vibration, and the thoughts go out, finds the match and they bring it on home. So how are you going to maintain your frequency? I think we need to look at what changes the frequency. Emotions. Emotions will change your frequency. So you're meditating and you're requesting this big ass pile of money to come your way. It's coming. But somebody comes by and breaks that vibration that you had going all day long because, oh, I don't know, their car cut you off. And now you're angry. And not only are you angry, but you're going to stay there all day long angry. So that whole day is wasted. There's no manifestations coming on that day anymore. And if you're still angry with them tomorrow, then guess what? You're gonna miss that. Then that goes away and somebody in your house kicks you in the knees and you're like, oh my God, would you be careful? What the hell is wrong with you? And another day gets taken away from you. So what alters your emotion? Anything? Played a few top 100. Top 100 people were surveyed. Top 6 answers are on the board. Who or what changes your emotions? Well, Dear, it's my spouse. There's only one correct answer on this board. Myself. Nothing can change your emotion but yourself. Nobody makes you angry but you. This was a big revelation for me. I came from a place of anger and chaos. So I thought that people were supposed to make me that way and I thought I was supposed to react. When you don't react, that's when you know you've had an awakening of consciousness when you do something incorrectly over and over and over again. Every time this thing happens to you and then all of a sudden that doesn't happen anymore. The thing still happens. Your reaction doesn't. You made it to the other side and you have to do this again and again and again. No one can ever make you do anything. Without a gun to your head. Trust me, I know. And if you want to get upset about it, well, then you can. But you don't have to. There's no rule book that says you have to be sad because someone passed away. You have to be sad because you're at a funeral. You have to be angry because the car cut you off. You have to go have a drink because so and so made you crazy. Horseshit. You're in control of yourself. And the second you're not in control of yourself, then other people are controlling you. It's one or the other. You can't have it both ways. Either you let them control you or you control yourself. If you can't control yourself, you can throw enlightenment right out the window. And along with your awakening with it, you can't have it. The day my anger went away was the day I hit a deer with my car. An expensive car that I saved a lot of money to buy. It took me a long time. It was a big deal at the time. Not a big. And the second I hit that deer and that car was crumbled, I was like, oh, well. Didn't call anybody. Didn't get upset. Checked on the deer, which was miraculously fine. Got up and walked away. I was miraculously fine. Got up and walked away. Somehow my car was drivable. So I drove it directly to the auto body shop and left it there and took an Uber home. Went to sleep. Didn't lose any sleep over it. Woke up the next morning, and my son thought my car was stolen. Oh, my God. I said, well, I had an accident. Why didn't you tell me you had an accident? This is why I didn't tell you I had an accident. Because you react well. How come you're not reacting? Because I don't give a shit. It's just a car. And in that moment, I realized that nothing fucking matters. Absolutely nothing fucking matters. And if you're gonna tell yourself that you need a drink every time you get upset, guess what. You're an alcoholic. You just don't know it yet, because it controls you. You're reactive to it. You're not in control of yourself. And if I can come over there and I call you a. And that upsets you. You're not in control of yourself because that's absolutely ridiculous. Why would you let me control you? Why would you let me prevent you from having the million dollars that you're trying to manifest? Think about how silly that is. I ran a stop sign not too long ago, and the guy Was mother effing me up and down like crazy. Stopped the car, almost got out of the car, and I started laughing. My ass. I was like, I used to be just like you. Oh, my God, I look ridiculous. We did not actually hit. I don't even have a reason to be upset. And even if we did, can't go back in time. What's done is done. It is what it is. Move on. Because the more you dwell in the last moment, guess what? You are not living in the present. If you are living in the present, then you don't care what happened five seconds ago. It is already over. Takes us to our fifth takeaway of seven. Tune into your higher self. Stay there. At your highest level of consciousness is something that we call your awareness. The reason we call it your awareness, and we put it at the top, is because you are one of the few living beings that are aware that you're having a thought in the first place. You're aware you're having an emotion in the first place. And if you're aware of that fact, you can change that fact. This is why they say ignorance is bliss. Because if you have no idea and you just go through life, you do not care. But here is the trick. To care but not care at the same time. It is the art of surrender, and it is the beginning of the egoic fracture. Surrender to what is because it already is. Make it as though you meant for it to be this way. Since it is that way, why do it any other way? Why go. Oh, my God. This happened to me today. No, This didn't happen to you. This is what transpired. I'm experiencing a little disappointment. And five minutes from now, we're going to go have a great time. How about that? Here's a big one. What's reality? What is real and what isn't real? What is real? What is reality? We think it's everything that we take in with our five physical senses. Those are the only real things there are. I can touch it. I can feel it. I can see it, I can smell it. It must be real. Is it safe to say that there are things that we are well aware of that we cannot smell, see, touch, or feel, but we know they're there and they are very real. Isn't that the subatomic world? We know that I'm standing on a platform that's probably made of wood. But the atoms that make up the wood are over 90% space, right? We know that because science has told us that they can blow up the atom and look inside and there's nothing there. Okay? So in this realm, I'm standing on something and I'm not falling through it. Even though it's 90% nothing, That's plausible. That's normal in the subatomic world. But now, if I built you a house and I said, I'm only going to build that, I don't know, 10% of it or so, would you buy it? No, it's going to fall down. It's a guaranteed. Because where we live, where we see the material, objective world, you cannot have it that way. But in the subatomic world, which is part of this world, it is perfectly normal, acceptable to have only 10% or less matter. And everything stays together. And then we have the spiritual right metaphorically above us. And that's run by energy. And some would say that that energy is the energy that exists in the space of each and every atom. So it brings us back full circle. Spiritual, material, subatomic. See, it cannot touch it, taste it, smell it, or anything else for that matter. But it is there. So what should you believe in? This one never lies. You have a sixth sense and you can use it. You have to learn. If you do not already know how, but I think you kind of do, but you've always questioned it. How many times have you thought of a person? The phone rings, you pick it up and there it is. That's that person. Oh, my God. I was just thinking about you. It's all done. You already have it. You already know how to put out that vibration and get it back. You already know when somebody else is putting out a vibration. You know how to do this. It is natural. You were born with it. Again, I ain't special. Now, if you go by your fifth five senses only, you leave the sixth out. You remove the spiritual and you remove the subatomic and you're left with one third of reality. It's all you have, 33%. You're missing 66.6% of the entire universe around you. That sucks for you. The seventh takeaway. Change your perception and change your entire life. Remember this quote? One's perception is one's truth. Change your perception and you can change your truth. Change your truth and you have changed your reality. Change your program. I did not discover this first. There are other people that use this every day. And I do not even know if they know what it is that they're doing. I saw an interview with Michael Jordan once, and the reporter asked him, how do you make those three point shots that no one else can make. And he was like, oh, I just kind of do it. Then he thought about it for a moment. He came back with an answer that floored me. Sometimes I go out on the basketball court and the hoop is just basketball hoop. But then there's other times I go out there and it's this big old bucket and I put the ball up and I can't miss ever. He changes his reality to what he needs it to be and believes it to accomplish what he needs to accomplish. How fucking powerful that is. Absolutely amazing. Let's begin your transformation. I'm going to give you another quote. I didn't write this one, though. Nothing is either good nor bad. But thinking makes it dumb. Shakespeare wrote that. How you speak to yourself, how you look at things. Your perception of truth is going to become your reality. So what you must do is train your brain. I call it train the brain. Retrain the brain to see things in the positive sense. Constantly retraining your thoughts. Constantly retraining your words so that they are said in a positive tense. Never again will you say, I have to drive my kids to school. You get to drive your kids to school. It is a privilege. People don't have kids. I have to cook dinner. No, you get dinner. You have people to cook it for. You have food to cook with. You get to do these things. You don't have to do anything. I'm tired of being sick. I don't want to be sick anymore about saying, I want to be healthy. I'm going to be healthy. I am healthy. Try those versions every time. Do it over and over and over. You're not going to get this in a week. You're not going to get this in a month. You're not even going to get it in a fucking year. But you've got to do it. And once you get there, you will hit a deer. And you will be just worried about the deer and yourself for a moment until you see that everything is fine. Going to leave you with one last story about a man and his dog. I actually don't know who wrote this, but I did tweak it a little bit for my liking. There's no author credit given. I read it someplace. I thought it was really good. And it applies. One sunny afternoon, a man takes his dog for a walk. While going past the wooded area, the dog sees a rabbit. Dog immediately takes off after the rabbit. And the man wasn't holding his grip of the leash completely. And the dog gets away. And he chases the rabbit, and the rabbit is very fast. Dog can't keep. Rabbit keeps going and going. The dog keeps going and going, and the man can't keep up with either of them, so they're gone. The rabbit eventually gets away, and the dog is completely lost and does not know how to get home. The man is distraught. He gives up looking for his dog. He goes home and he thinks how unlucky he must be that that rabbit went by at that exact time when he wasn't holding the leash, right? So for the next week, the man is hanging up signs. I lost my dog. If anybody finds my dog, please bring my dog. Please, please, please. I lost my dog. He thinks after two weeks that his dog is gone. That is is over. And then a woman comes to the door, rings his doorbell, and he answers it to see the most beautiful woman he's ever seen in his entire life. They have an instant bonding connection, and guess what? She's holding the dog. The man and the woman exchange phone numbers, and they decide to keep in touch. The dog is safe at home. A romance ensues between the man and the woman. They fall in love eventually and get married, and they still have the dog. That man's like, wow, how lucky I must be that someone came to the door with my dog and was looking for a soulmate at the exact same time that I was. I'm the luckiest man alive. Then one day, the man is driving to pick up his lovely wife, newlywed from her place of work. And while en route, he thinks about how lucky he is. I'm so lucky. The man pulls up to an intersection with a green light and proceeds to go forward as a truck runs the red light going the other way, crashing right into the side of the man's car. The man is crushed and rushed to the hospital, where he undergoes a series of tests for head injuries. The doctor says, we're not going to know the severity of the injuries until we get all of our scans. The man's conscious and thinks to himself, how fucking unlucky do I have to be? I've been at that intersection at that moment in time when that truck was going to run afterwards. Well, the doctor comes back in, he has the results in his hand, and he says, well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. And to be quite honest with you, they're the same news. The man looks very confused and says, I don't get it. I do not understand. Please elaborate. The doctor says, well, listen, the bad news is we found something in the scan. It's a brain tumor. The guy's like, there's good news. Well, yes, there's good news. We found a tumor in your brain scan. You see, that type of a tumor was not caused by your accident. It's been there but it's very, very small right now and we can actually remove it. These types of tumors usually show up when they're too big to be operated on. So to be quite honest with you, sir, this accident just saved your life. The man, his thoughts are all over the place. He's lucky, he's unlucky, he's bad, he's. This is that. The good news is Ben is. I don't understand any. He just goes to sleep. The man undergoes a successful surgery to remove the tumor. He is released from the hospital within days. He returns home with his loving wife and dog and just the scar on his head to remind him that nothing is either good or bad. But thinking makes it so. It.