Sophia Talks About: Beyond Fate… The Make Luck Business

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Question:  HOW DOES ONE GO BEYOND FATE… AND MAKE LUCK?
Sophia:   Our very best life does not come from the other or the outside.  It comes from within.
We have two natures, an inborn, true nature and a trained, conditioned nature.  Both natures coexist in us and speak to us, often in sparring voices. 
The authentic voice - spirit - the voice dictating from true nature points the way.  It brings meaning and purpose and guides us naturally and effortlessly to our highest success.
The voice of our true nature is often held back or snowed under by the impact of socialization. The voice dictating from the trained, conditioned nature is loud and obtrusive.  It's entrapped in the past and its same old self-image, same old beliefs and same old habits and fears.
We often tend to identify more with the voice dictating from our conditioned nature, faithfully following its directives, going as far as calling it our personality, thinking we were born with it, while we are not. 
In doing so our difficulties are constantly being repeated, last longer or hurt more.
Going Beyond Fate... means understanding that you are not your past and that you are not your conditioning.  Once you get that you have broken the entrapment.  
Going Beyond Fate... means getting away from needless suffering and moving into your dreams.  When you align yourself with your inner guide you will always be safe and peaceful.  What's more, when you live by the inner light the universe becomes the accomplice of all your wishes.   Living spirit to the fullest is per definition highest luck and success.

Question: HOW DID WE BECOME ENTRAPPED BY PAST AND CONDITIONING?
Sophia:  While we grow up we take in beliefs and projections about ourselves from the environment, just like we inhale air.   Because we have not been told better and therefore don't know better, we often fall for what comes from the outside, hook, line and sinker.  What is imposed on us by others is gradually and unconsciously internalized/swallowed and made our own - as if by osmosis.  
We have been sold falsehood.  And now we condemn ourselves with the foreign and false messages and make all of it part of our self-esteem.  
"I believed that I was everything  my father told me I was", said journalist and novelist Dominick Dunne (1925-2009) in a recent documentary about his life, aptly called - After The Party. 
"Some of the pain about his criticism is still with me".  "I thought low of myself".  "I didn't feel I deserved to be where I was".  "I did dangerous things".  "I was the architect of my own failure". 
Dunne lost his marriage, his career as a successful and wealthy Hollywood producer, his beautiful home and the many party's he and his wife threw, attended by the rich, the glamorous, and the famous.  "I always thought I was not worthy".  
In midlife Dunne wound up completely broke, because he believed his father appraisal of him as a deficient, unworthy child, who deserved beatings with the belt.  
Like most children Dunne did not realize that he had become the repository for his father's personal problems and projections.  Like most children he faithfully accepted whatever his father fed him as "the truth".  Dunne was loyal to his father's appraisal to the detriment of himself. 
This loyalty became a self-fulfilling phrophecy: he became the "fuck-up" and "sissy" his father made him think he was.  Yet the unforgettable Dominick Dunne had the courage to spend months in a cabin far away from Hollywood, take stock, enter a 12 step program, stop believing his father's projections, start believing in himself and get back on top. 
He lived a profoundly valuable and successful second act, in which he empowered himself by taking on bullies, taking on the murderer of his daughter and taking on the American judicial system.
Richard Pryor, in his infinite wisdom, explains the title of his autobiography: Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences: "Family is a mixed blessing. You're glad to have one, but it's also like receiving a life sentence for a crime you did not commit".
How do beautiful, extra-ordinary gifted, rich and famous men like Dominick Dunne, Richard Pryor or Marvin Gaye wind up extra-ordinarily self-destructive?
Growing up they - like most of us - swallowed the crap and cruelty imposed on them by their environment and it imprinted them.  They were marked and the mark became self-abuse. 
Though the true self was strong and determined for years, ultimately the mark won out.
In the end the mark literally struck Pryor down in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis. "God struck me down with this M.S. shit to save my life", he said.   Yet the source of his life threatening self-abuse and subsequent illnesses was internalized crap and cruelty.  The mark struck him down, not God.  All God did was lovingly save his life over and over.
Marvin Gaye was literally killed by the mark.  
Marvin, in his deeply engrained self-loading practically handed his father the gun to shoot him, provoked his father to end the internal anguish caused by severe abuse in his childhood.  
The father who shot Marvin was the father who instilled the emotional turmoil and self-sabotage in Marvin in the first place.   And the mother who supposedly loved Marvin so much, was the same mother who devastatingly failed to protect him from his father's sadistic, satanic, sexually tainted beatings when he was little.   Everyone in Marvin's environment colluded with the violence.  
No one spoke up for the abused child, no one expressed indignation.  No one stopped the father.  Even the justice system let father off the hook. So how is Marvin to know he deserved better? 
Self-love is learned through the love of the environment.  Who taught Marvin he was loveble for who he was, instead of what he had to offer to the other?  Who told him he deserved better than what he got in his childhood?  Who taught him to let go of the cruel, demeaning internalized parental voice?  Who helped him change his self-image?  Who taught him to break the vicious cycle of self-sabotage, to fully live his higher self, all the way into a deserved, happy old age?
Of course, the original culprit for all involved was the deadly sting of slavery and racism.
Given cultural history, environment, childhood, the relentless pressure of the entertainment world and the intens scrutiny of the media, it is a pure miracle these men held out as long and as brilliant as they did.   Most people would have given up a long time ago, or become homicidal.
That pure miracle is the first voice, spirit, the spark we share with the eternal Divine flame.
Imagine these men of genius freeing themselves of the internalized mark...
Imagine the possibilities of the free and undisturbed vitality of your spirit and nature!

Question: PLEASE TELL US MORE ABOUT ENTRAPMENT VERSUS FREEDOM.
Sophia: After working with many people from all walks of life, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, I began to see patterns.  We are beholden to the past in ways we are unaware of and in ways we self create or re-enact. The mark goes hand in hand with the "merry-go-round".  
The "merry-go-round is our natural inclination, our natural compulsion to resurrect known situations, simply because we don't know better and it feels comfortable in its familiarity (familiarity as in familar and familiarity as in family).
Musician Eric Clapton was a substance abuser for most of his life, with a string of failed relationships. When after years of longing for stunning model Patty Boyd, wife of Beatle George Harrison, he married her, only to be faced with a divorce, he finally started to ask himself some serious questions: "Were these the conditions that had governed my feelings about my mother and was I still unconsciously trying to replicate that relationship"?
You bet Eric was!   He was entrapped in a familiar, same old vicious cycle.  Because his mother rejected him from a very early age, Eric resurrected rejection in his relations from age nine on: "I became surly and withdrawn, rejecting everyone's affection, as I felt I had been rejected". "I found a pattern in my behavior that had been repeating itself for years, decades even". "I could only choose partners who would ultimately abandon me, as I was convinced my mother had done, all those years ago". "I was living it all out in the present". "It seemed I would never be able to break the mold".
Eric puts the finger on the merry-go-round.   We become puppets on the strings of our past lacerations.   We keep resurrecting the same old fates.   From habit we live our past.  
From habit we repeat "old", even though we desperately long for something better.
Mark, merry-go-round and mold make up "the box".   The box represents obstacles and atrophy. Although Clapton is a genius in music, he suffered from a fatal state of atrophy in his personal life. The good news is that you can study self-created obstacles.  What you learned, you can unlearn.
We can take the poison out. We can remove the deadly sting.  We can break the mold.
Going beyond fate means peeling away the rubble, climbing out of the box, being free to use the muscles of the interior source, work away the atrophy and live full strength and purpose.

Question: HOW DOES ONE CLIMB OUT OF THE BOX, THE PRISON OF OUR PAST?
Sophia: There is not one strategy.  If there was one everyone would be doing it.  It's a bunch of strategies applied simultaniously, all of them in the service of working through and rising above one's past.  We go on a personal archeological dig, while simultaniously gaining clarity about the future.  Once obstacles are dissolved and intend is crystal clear, things fall into place, as if the universe is aligning itself with the personal.  I've seen it happen time and time again.
Eric Clapton bravely took on a personal gig of uncovering and recovering. He was willing to lay it on the line and insisted on healing for the sake of his now deceased son Connor: "I had to break the chain and give him what I never really had…"
Everyone lives at least one core theme from the past that gets repeated over and over. 
Imagine the amount of energy and potential Eric freed up, once he dissolved old defenses and broke mold and merry go round.  He attracted a new way of living and the family he never had! 
 
Question: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO ELIMINATE THE OBSTACLES IN THE WAY OF MANIFESTING OUR VERY BEST LIFE?
Sophia: It is easy to reach out to quick fix.  It is easy to keep acting out, like Eric Clapton before his recovery. That's all comfort-zone.   It does not create anything new.
The requirement is commitment.   Everything else is right there inside of you.
It's a matter of making time and putting one foot in front of the other, as we dig and clear and dig and clear some more. Once layers are cleared, light bulbs go on, quarters drop, thinking and feeling shifts and intent becomes crystal clear, we're attracting and creating "better and new".

Question: WHAT IS THE MOST COMMON OBSTRUCTION IN THE WAY OF MAXIMIZING THE POWER OF FREE WILL AND CHOICE?
Sophia: One of the great tragedies of human behavior is that the smart and efficient adaptations we create in our childhood to survive difficult situations, inevitably turn against us and defeat us, when we become adults. When Eric Clapton at nine years old became surly and rejecting, it was simply his way of surviving a profound painful trauma. Becoming surly and rejecting was his defense, very effective given the situation and his age.   Yet the same smart defense turned into a restrictive solution and kept him from growing and getting his needs met, once an adult.
The good news is that we can turn the great tragedy into great opportunity and the restrictive solutions into win-win solutions, as Clapton and others prove.   Then we're no longer hooked into old and fate. We have options. We have a choice. We are free to use FREE WILL FULL FORCE.

Question: HOW CAN WE USE THE POWER OF MIND TO MAKE LUCK AND CREATE MAXIMUM PURPOSE AND PROSPERITY?
Sophia: Through the ages people have known about the awesome power of thought transformation, self-fulfilling prophecy and the Law of Attraction and High Invocation and used these powers to transform problems into happiness and success.
"The Secret", as seen in the movie or described in Rhonda Byrne's book, was known by Aboriginal peoples, ancient Polynesians and well-known sages alike.  
"With our thoughts we make the world", says the Buddha.
"Ask, believing that you have received it now", said Jesus.
"Until we believe that it is, said Ernest Holmes, we are believing that it is not!"
Jamie Sams, a Native American medicine teacher tells us: "the human children of the earth have bodies that stand upright, keeping their thoughts above their bodies as a reminder that thoughts are the first acts of manifesting reality".
Many people who promote "the Secret" talk about it as if it is something new, as if it is their secret, as if they know some magic trick to make all our dreams come true, not fully comprehending the tradition.
The true keepers of the Secret, the Kahunas, the ancient spiritual advisers of Hawaii (kahu is caretaker), were careful never to separate the practice from it's spiritual context.  
The objective was balance and completeness, a material, emotional and physical wellbeing, a general changing of life for the better: hence the make luck business.
Most people who promote "the Secret", do not understand or conveniently forget to tell you that thought transformation only works when you have a handle on your unconscious intentions. 
It only works when you acquire awareness of and insight in your personal habits. It only works when your right hand has a firm grip on what your left hand is doing. 
Through awareness we can change and shift thinking.  We let go of old thoughts and make room for new thoughts.  New thoughts literally generate new things, new manifestation. 
Whatever you picture in your mind, if you picture it vividly and earnestly enough, is eventually attracted by you, in your outer world.  
Unfortunately unconscious ambivalence obstructs new thinking and thus obstructs making luck. 
So we have to do some work in terms of clearing old thinking and acquiring crystal clear intention.  Once the intend is crystal clear it will always become new manifestation.
Tina Turner is a great example of the POWER OF MIND, never mind SPIRIT and FREE WILL.
Tina is right up there with Victor Frankl who survived World War II and the Holocaust, because he understood that "the last of human freedom's is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way".
Tina chose her own way. She never bought into the crap and cruelty imposed on her, growing up or while married to Ike Turner.   She suffered it.   But she did not swallow it. 
She did not swallow that her mother did not love her.  She simply felt sorry for herself.   She did not swallow Ike's abuse or bad behavior: "Once when Ike tried to give me drugs, I blew it in his face.  I have principles I feel good about.  I like me very much."   She knew she did not earn it:  "I've been told many reasons for why I lived through what I did.  But I never felt I deserved it."  Tina knew she was simply working through fate, learning lessons, finishing up karma: "I came into this lifetime with a job to finish, I finished it well."
Tina literally worked, prayed and chanted hell out of her life, until all her dreams came true…