What’s the difference between the Fourfold Mantra of the Ho’oponopono tradition and the Fivefold Mantra I teach in my book, Śunyata: the Transformative Power of Emptiness?

Put simply, both mantras will have the identical benefit of clearing chaotic data from the subconscious level. Both will affect a powerful healing in your heart, mind and experience.

There is one significant difference, and that is that the fourfold mantra does nothing to reinforce the non-dualistic path. So often we find practitioners losing focus… imagining that they can heal others, fix others, transform others. Or the tendency to believe that someone else is or has the problem.

And because the hearts and minds of most practitioners are genuinely compassionate and wish to alleviate suffering, it often causes them to spur-off in a hundred directions, until they are no longer practicing a clear and focused path, and are contradicting themselves all over the place.

The Fivefold Mantra ends with “Namasté” — the essential recognition that we share one common, sacred and Enlightened Nature, and that all phenomena is inherently empty, because it is all created in our minds. Therefore, it returns us to the Essential Practice, which recognises that we do NOT need to know what we’re clearing on the subconscious level, because thoughts are thoughts. Period. We do NOT have the power to clear others. We do NOT need to engage in complex schema and ritual to arrive at the place the mystics experienced in Deep Contemplation and Meditation.

We simply need to say:

I Love You. – This is an expression of love for the Essential Nature… the Awakened Heart Within. It recognises that there is nothing else.

I Am Sorry. – This is a confessional gesture, which recognises that we have made deluded and dualistic decisions, and thought or acted upon them… and it is an outward indication that we wish to change those things.

Please Forgive Me. – This is the “triggering phrase” which allows the subconscious mind to release those things that are attached to it. Like a powerful magnet brushed over the hard drive of our subconscious, it clears and eliminates data.

Thank you. – This is our expression of gratitude for that which we have just done.

It is incomplete, if we stop here.

Why?

Because you’ve cleared away the data on the subconscious, but using the analogy of the hard drive, you erased everything with the magnet, but left the hard drive unformatted.  What good is that?

Another analogy would be to think of your subconscious as your home in this incarnation. Within that home, you realise there are some pretty old, broken, and dirty pieces of furniture that have long outlived their usefulness. So you decide to put them out by the curb for the garbage collectors to pick-up.

But if that were all you did, when you came back in the house, and notice that you have no table or chairs, and are hungry. You might be tempted to bring in one of the old chairs and table, “just till dinner is done”. And when you’ve finished eating, you might realise that chair is a little uncomfortable, so you go out and bring in the worn out, broken recliner. And before long, the garbage collectors have come, and most of the broken furniture is back in your house again!

The final phrase of the Fivefold Mantra, Namasté, replaces the errant and chaotic data with Truth. In doing so, it “reformats” that hard drive, and replaces the furniture in that house with new, beautiful and useful furnishings.

In writing our books, “Return to Zeropoint” and “Śunyata: the Transformative Power of Excellence“, Robert F. Ray and I very intentionally broke the material up into two parts, with him writing the basic, core information, mostly focused on the incomplete path of Ho’oponopono, and my focus being to then take those essential concepts and provide a working framework, background and more complete picture of how to effect healing. If you’re reading one book without the other, you’re not going to get the full benefit of the practice.

And the books themselves are nothing more than a starting point. The real work begins when you put the concepts and practices to work in your life, and begin taking 100% Responsibility for your experiences.

We will be building on this, by providing all of you with a support system and community that will enhance and guide you in your practice every day. More on this will be coming in the months ahead.

Namasté and much aloha!

khenpo gurudas sunyatananda

As a practitioner and teacher of Esoteric Buddhism, New Thought and Ho’oponopono, one of the most frequent misconceptions I encounter is one of the most serious as well. Before we look more closely at the component ideas of this misconception, I want to share a very sad story with you, as an illustration of my reasons for addressing this issue now.

During the 1980s, a best-selling author and New Thought practitioner began holding workshops and healing seminars for young men in the Los Angeles area, who were diagnosed with AIDS. Nothing she did was motivated by anything other than love, and everything she taught was 100% accurate and responsible. She would have given her life to save these men, who were mostly gay and bisexual.

She would teach them the metaphysical reasons for their experience of dis-ease, by explaining the mental causes that most often were behind specific manifestations of illness. And she would teach them how to replace those thoughts with a “New Thought” – a higher truth, which would begin to transform the mind, and could not have any other effect beside healing.

One young man in the group had Kaposi’s Sarcoma -  a cancerous tumour of the connective tissue, and is often associated with AIDS. The tumours in Kaposi’s Sarcoma, or KS as it is called, are bluish-red patches and splotches on the skin, and frequently show up on the face, neck and extremities. This young man has KS lesions on his face and neck. He’d been coming to the weekly healing circles for some time, and participated in the almost monthly weekend workshops.

After several months of doing the exercises recommended for beginning to transform the mind, he came to one of the sessions and asked why he was not getting better, and the teacher responded by telling him he just wasn’t doing the work necessary to effect change in his life. Two days later, that young man was found dead in his apartment, having hanged himself. He interpreted what she said as being a condemnation of his personal failure.

What that teacher said was not incorrect, in one respect, but most of us would agree that it wasn’t necessarily the easiest thing for that young man to process, and my personal sense is that it was an insensitive and even irresponsible way of dealing with his question. Now, understand that I still respect and am grateful for this teacher’s work, which is extensive and has contributed immensely to healing of our planet. And she was, I am certain, doing the very best she could to help him. But what he needed was psychological help, without which all of the mental affirmations and healing would have no fertile soil in which to take hold.

I began teaching three months later, and resolved that I would never let that happen on my watch. But there were differences in what I taught as well, because I understood, from my Ho’oponopono training, to that young man’s dis-ease as a reflection of something within me that needed to be resolved, not within him. So when Robert and I travel the country, doing these Zeropoint Breakthrough workshops and intensives, we intensely clean within ourselves, recognising that everything that comes up is something we need to clean and erase on the “hard drive” of our subconscious minds.

What if you learn to use these techniques for personal transformation, and you don’t experience healing?

Does it mean that you failed? Of course not. And when those thoughts arise, we have to realise that they are not coming from anywhere but the chaotic data within us.

We are Perfect Awareness, and if “perfect” is part of the equation, then that means “we” cannot fail. So when we experience what appears to be failure, it is always just a reflection and manifestation of some chaotic and errant idea or belief, playing on the subconscious level.

Let me give you an example. As many of you know, I live my life as someone with full-blown AIDS and Parkinson’s Disease. Now we could say that these two forms of dis-ease always manifest as a result of certain biological conditions, and that would be the proper “medical” explanation. And it would be accurate. But Esoteric Buddhism and New Thought philosophy goes deeper to uncover why those causes and conditions manifested in our experience in the first place, and looks to the metaphysical roots of those issues.

In the case of AIDS, you might choose to use the acronym to think of it as “anger incorrectly directed at the self”. It’s the same root cause of most cancers. When there is such intense anger in the body, science has verified that systems begin to breakdown, and cell division sometimes fails to function properly. We have seen the perfect demonstration of this in Dr. Emoto’s work with the effects of anger, fear and love on water.

And Parkinson’s Dis-ease almost always arises in a body and mind that recognises, as a Wayseer, that we are inextricably connected with our Source, and are Pure Awareness, but which becomes gripped by fear and anger over our not being able to wake the world up to how things could really be. In such a mindset, our bodies expend tremendous amounts of dopamine, I believe, early on, and when that dopamine cannot seem to effect mental clarity, balanced mood and peace for us, the dopamine function begins to decline. In short, we begin to give up on ever being able to really make a difference in this chaotic world. (Now think… where does that chaotic world really exist? In our subconscious minds!)

Some medical professionals are unable to get their arms around this, because they have been conditioned only to see the world of superficial cause and effect. But more and more, science is beginning to understand the possibility of a quantum level connection between dis-ease and the mind. Cancer centres are employing alternative methods of healing in conjunction with traditional allopathic modalities. Meditation is being recommended for people with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and depression. And so on.

Now, back to our question… Just because you haven’t manifest the immediate eradication of your dis-ease, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. But it does mean you are not operating fully from Pure Awareness. There is almost always some fear, some resentment, some “logical” reason for not completely surrendering the experience, and deleting it from the hard-drive.

In my own case, two of the most compelling reasons I can find are both results of programming (imprinting) from my past experiences:

I have, from the time I entered the monastery, worked 16-19 hours every day, seven days a week. My mind  only “shuts down” when I am on the meditation mat. And I thrive in that environment. I grew up in the era of work hard, party hard, play hard, study hard, practice hard. (Did you just have an “Aha!” moment? Did you sense a connection between the “work hard, party hard, play hard, etc.”  and the manifestation of hard, rigid, intense muscle contractions in my body as a person with Parkinson’s? Good for you!)

Many people with this lifestyle would succumb to things like chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or MS. But those things would barely slow me down (I am sure of that, because when the Parkinson’s “early onset” began, I was 19 years old, and they originally thought it was MS. I decided that if I was going to end up in a wheel chair, I needed to extend the hours a worked a little longer to ensure that I learned all I could, served all I could, and alleviated as much suffering in this world as I could, while I was still able to do so.)

So my conscious mind, hooked into the fears and beliefs, and to the observations of how things appear to be in this world, did what it needed to do to slow me down. Forcing me, from time to time, to have to spend a day in bed, recovering, meditating and relaxing.

Because I am high-functioning on the autistic spectrum, there are certain things that trigger my mind to really spiral into an intense determination to “set things right”, and other things which just frustrate me intensely, because of the neurological disconnect. If I stay in front of the computer or in front of people, I feel like I will have a melt-down, and so the body manifests dis-ease as a reflection of the internal dis-ease, and I immediately recognise it as such.

Would I like to be free of Parkinson’s and AIDS? Yes. Is it something I passionately work toward? No. And here’s the second reason for that.

I am fairly certain my work ethic is not going to decline, and my hardwiring will always ne neuroatypical. And I also know that if I return to work, all of the medical care I presently have, which totals more than $2900K/month for medications and $1100 a month for doctor visits, labs and treatment, would end. I would need to earn a minimum of $2900, plus $1100, plus the $1500 per month for rent and utilities, and internet. That means $7,425/month before taxes. Now, if there is someone out there willing to pay be $247 per hour, please let me know. I will be happy to discuss that with you. In the meantime, fear of what will happen if I lose that medical coverage, holds me back from the last few steps of healing.

My point is that none of us knows why someone else holds onto dis-ease longer than another person. It’s almost always a matter of fear or resentment.  But rather than work on them, we should turn our focus on working more intently on us. Within this article are a half dozen or so issues YOU have to work on right now within your subconscious mind. And the techniques we teach you in Return to Zeropoint and Sunyata: the Transformative Power of Emptiness, will allow you to do that.

Last night, I was watching television with a couple of my students, and a program came on about a mother, whose daughter was murdered. Her story was sad and touching. “So how can we say that mother created the experience of her daughter’s boyfriend killing her?” one of the students asked.

Quite simply the mother didn’t decide that her daughter should be murdered, but she did create the causes for the what she experiences as her life. And so the mother, who spoke about how she asks “God” why “he” let her daughter be killed is looking in the wrong direction. She’s not taking 100% responsibility for what happens in her life. She could and should begin to work on cleaning her subconscious, so that this painful experience will create the causes for healing and spiritual insight for her. In short, she should use it as grist for the mill.

Similarly, while my situation isn’t nearly as painful as the emotional pain of losing her daughter, I am not taking 100% Responsibility in my life, by allowing fear of losing everything to manifest as dis-ease. 

So we all have work to do, and guilt is not part of it.

This life is a journey. Each moment is the only thing we have to work with. And so I, like you, have to work with the moment, and allow each layer of the “onion” to peel away, until I get to the very centre, where it appears to be empty, but in which space there exists Pure Awareness… my true nature.

Let go of the need to place blame. It serves no purpose.

Simply allow yourself to become more mindful… moment-by-moment… and see the opportunities to do some “cleaning” in everything you encounter on any given day. Embrace them with gratitude, and life becomes a “series of eucharistic moments”… moments of profound gratitude, healing and transmutation.

Much aloha!