What shapes the events we encounter in life? What molds them into success or failure, health or illness, poverty or wealth? Fate, luck, happenstance? Or a deeper dynamics not yet understood by science?

While a vice president in the computer industry, Lynda Dahl stumbled onto an astonishing message: Our lives are crafted from the fabric of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. What seems to happen to us is caused by us. By changing our beliefs, we literally redesign our lives into what we choose to experience.

In award-winning Beyond the Winning Streak: Using Conscious Creation to Consistently Win at Life, Dahl shares her doubts, disillusionment and triumphs as she seeks to understand conscious creation . . . and ends up creating a million dollars.

Full Prologue

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination.

Cotton candy clouds hung above the rugged Na Pali cliffs, white fluff accentuating the dazzling greens of vegetation and blues of sky and water. The day was postcard perfect on the west coast of Kauai that summer of 1989 as Stan, my partner in love and life, turned our rental car north through the verdant Hanalei Valley. Our anticipation grew as we approached our destination.

While playing tourists the day before, we had wandered into a tiny metaphysical bookstore on the northern coast of the island. A poster tacked on the bulletin board announced a trance channeling session to be held in the countryside the next day. The channeler, described as a well known international personality who allowed a nonphysical consciousness to speak through him, was on his way to the Orient with this stopover on Kauai. It was just upbeat enough to get our attention, and offbeat enough to promise a unique ending to our vacation.

Stan turned inland on a narrow country road, passing a dairy farm and heading into the island's rolling agricultural land. The large blue and white striped canopy, our destination’s landmark, was easy to spot, a startling modern contrast to the nearby traditional Hawaiian house. After greeting us warmly, our hosts guided us to shady seats under the awning.

While we waited for the crowd to settle in, my mind wandered back over the years and events that led two fully molded products of the computer age to so comfortably await the words of a trance channeler. In 1985, I was a manager with Apple Computer, Inc. By the time Stan and I visited Hawaii in 1989, I was vice president of a high-tech company, my income had more than doubled…and I held company stock worth one million dollars.

In the intervening years, I had stumbled upon my own kind of miracle. I discovered there is no cause and effect in the classical sense, but that I am the cause of the external events that happen to me. Fate, circumstance and luck became passé concepts. I learned the most freeing, the most exciting news of all times: We create our lives from the fabric of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs. What seems to happen to us is caused by us. What we think of ourselves, our world and the universe becomes the building blocks for the events and material objects that enter our lives.

If there is more fantastic news, what possibly could it be? Intrinsic to our being is the ability to create what we want to experience. We feed our beliefs inward through our thoughts, emotions and imagination. Our unquestioning, non-judgmental inner selves take that raw data and faithfully form events that reflect exactly what we expect to see.

But of course I didn't believe a word of it when I bought my first metaphysical book by mistake. The prose of the author's previous books, non-metaphysical in nature, had hooked me. I needed another fix. Had I suspected her latest offering of being "foo-foo" stuff, my interest would have ebbed faster than the ocean's tide.

But, fascinated from page one on, I decided to research several names she mentioned. Buried behind sunglasses, I slinked into a small metaphysical bookstore near Palo Alto, California. Cloying incense and pictures of bearded gurus holding spiritual court deepened my concern that I'd left the rational world behind at the shop's threshold. I knew I'd joined Alice on the far side of the looking glass when I gazed upon a painting of a disembodied chalk white hand pushing up through gray clouds while holding tightly to a lightening bolt.

As I approached the long-haired woman behind the cash register, I caught a glimpse of bare feet and ankle bells near the hem of a bleached cotton gown. The clicking of my high heels bounced off the crystals and amethysts in the display case, jarring the serenity of the shop. I asked for the books I desired, bought them, and beat a hasty retreat back into my world of business plans and technology.

From that inauspicious beginning I moved quickly through dozens of books, branching out to new authors as I learned of them. I wasn't convinced that there's more to reality than the official world allows, but my position was softening considerably. My focus became tuned to finding books that could tell me how to make happen in my life what I wanted to see.

I finally settled on the ideas outlined in the Seth books by Jane Roberts as the model I could accept. I am of a practical mind. I function well when I understand the basis for an assumption, but I'm completely unable to leap from the known to the unknown by faith alone. I don't need proof, just a glimpse of an underlying organization or structure that supports the claim.

When I'm told I can consciously create with my thoughts, I assume that if the statement is true, then there is a process a thought goes through in order to become part of a future event. A set of mechanics must come into play, albeit universal in scope but nonetheless systematic, that makes it happen. Seth, by clearly defining the nature of reality, gave me the understanding I needed to experiment with this pioneering concept of creating what I want to experience.

There was one problem, however. Neither Seth nor anyone else laid out a concise plan I could follow that would get me from here to there. They offered suggestions and mentioned some of the tools to use, but they gave me no checkpoints, no way to gauge the effectiveness of the process until my creation entered physical reality—or didn't, as the case might be. They didn't tell me what traps I could fall into, what steps would accelerate the process, what land mines awaited me. In essence, they just said I could do it…which is no insignificant message!

With a long career grounded in logic, I came well equipped into the realm of the foo-foo with attributes that eventually helped me start to break the code to conscious creation. My first simple successes came easily: I materialized parking places.

During the Christmas season, the San Francisco Bay area malls choke with vehicles bumper-fighting for the right to park. I selected that setting as my beta test site. I kept a form handy in my car, designed to capture certain data, such as when and where the test occurred, the condition of the parking lot, and whether I succeeded or failed at getting a place near my area of choice—which meant right up front.

As I neared the destination mall, I started visualizing myself nosing the car into a slot very close to the entrance I specified, feeling intense joy at having accomplished my little feat. After twenty-five hits and no misses, I threw the notebook away and chose my next project. No in-betweens for me. I set my goal for wealth.

Actually, I wanted freedom. Freedom to decide what to do with the rest of my life, to choose my own schedule, to be free of bosses, to do whatever pleased me with my days. Money could buy me that freedom, I reasoned, so wealth became my objective.

Oh, that it would have been as easy as creating parking places…but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Way back when, Stan was lovingly indifferent to my quest. "Oh, very interesting," was his usual polite murmur as I read aloud passages from my latest book. His return to his own reading material, exquisite in timing—not too soon to offend, but the exact nanosecond the way was clear—led me to suspect yawning boredom shared his side of the bed.

At the time, as head of a field service division for a large computer manufacturer, hundreds of people reported to him. His background is engineering, technical and financial. If I had difficulty leaving the supposed logical for the esoteric, Stan's leap had to be quantum. But eventually leap he did, if a slow crawl can be so colored by the paint brushes of retrospect.

In the beginning, his budding interest was frequently tempered by self-imposed reality checks, like the time he agreed to attend his first metaphysical seminar. As we were unpacking our suitcases, I enthusiastically told him conference attendees had completely booked the hotel. He opened the drapes with a flourish and stepped onto our second story balcony to better view the stunning high desert sunset.

After a moment he grew quiet, staring at the courtyard below. I wondered what was up as I moved to his side. There, in splendid regalia, were three women whose appearance suggested they had been time- transported from a wandering Old World Gypsy tribe. I smiled in appreciation of their creative dress and turned to him. His color had drained somewhat and his face was still. Very quietly he said, "What have you gotten me into?"

By the time we found ourselves sitting under the blue and white canopy watching the warm Hawaiian breeze ruffle its edges, we could see the light at the end of our personal tunnel. In four months I could cash in my stock and leave the computer industry. We were finally to be free after years of wild swings between depression and elation, desperation and knowing, complete faith and complete lack of it. We had maneuvered the waters of our consciousnesses, found riptides too late at times, but on time at others. In retrospect it was becoming clear how the process of conscious creation works and what pieces need to be in place in order to make the ride as smooth as possible. And the cornerstone of it all, of course, is the fact that beliefs create.

I drew my attention back from my thoughts to the words of the channeler now in a state of trance. But what was this I was hearing? That our belief systems have nothing to do with shaping the events we encounter? To allow the universe to make our decisions and have faith its choices will please us? To set aside the conscious mind for it only gets in the way?

One middle age man said he had stopped his high blood pressure medication to test the strength of his belief in the universe. Supposedly, if he was in alignment, his high blood pressure would be no more, right? Right. Well, he said, then he needed more faith, because his blood pressure had shot off the chart when he stopped his medication, and it obviously was his fault because he must be lacking in that one crucial ingredient.

Another man, young this time, asked for guidance on how to identify what career to pursue. He was told to drop his concern for it was ego-oriented, and wait for the universe to guide him into maybe not a career, but a job, which may or may not lead to a career, depending on the direction that would come from On High.

My thoughts flew into the atmosphere like tiny startled birds. Wait a minute! Sure it's important to align ourselves with the universal consciousness, to listen to our guidance and have faith in the assistance we receive. Sure! But whose life is this anyway? What happened to my own personal growth, or does it only involve listening to God tell me what's best? Perhaps there's more to learn than just how to listen and react. Maybe, just maybe, the universe doesn't want me to abdicate the responsibility for my learning. Indeed, will the structure of this reality even allow for such an occurrence?

What of my conscious mind, that wonderful extension of my inner self used to monitor my life's handiwork; what of its right to decide upon action? What if my guidance suggests I'd really wow them as an actress and I just sit and wait for the phone to ring announcing the Big Casting Call, instead of placing five calls a day to the people who can help me? Perhaps I have beliefs in place that say I'm actually afraid to face that casting call and it's easier to hope the universe will make the telephone ring, release all my fear during the audition, help me gain talent through osmosis and make me a star in spite of my stutter. Fat chance.

Unless my beliefs are in alignment with what the universe suggests, I may get the job but I won't hold it for long because I can't reflect what I don't feel inside. Maybe I was given a conscious mind as a terrific vehicle for working in concert with my inner self to understand how things happen in this reality and then change what limits me. Maybe one of our greatest lessons is that we are co-creators with the universe, with a defined, active role to play in the unfolding of our lives. And big surprise, can we actually be whole beings right now, spirit, mind and body working in concert, all pieces equal while on earth, all critical to the creation process?

Stan and I excused ourselves at the first break and headed back to the beach. Channeled or not, the information was off track. We felt dismay at old religious ideas peeking from the folds of metaphysical garments, hampering our movement toward fresh, desperately needed understandings that can restructure our world. We talked of everyone wanting peace, but few realizing that unless enough of us change our beliefs in vulnerability and victimization it can't happen. Everyone wanting health, but most believing they are innocent lambs awaiting the onslaught of viruses and diseases that attack randomly. Who doesn't want a good primary relationship, but how many know their beliefs about selfworth or intimate involvement may be the stumbling block to love, not their mate's personality?

The bottom line is responsibility, responsibility for our belief system that causes an event—that causes an effect—that causes an emotion—that reinforces what we think. In other words, we're responsible for the tapestry of our lives, the worn, tired threads and the bright shining buttons. The whole cloth. It doesn't matter one whit if we agree that we create everything that happens to us; we do it just the same. The difference between choosing to be aware and not choosing to can be the difference between a fulfilling, abundant existence and one fraught with upheaval.

On the drive back home in the bright Kauai sunshine, Stan and I realized the day hadn't been a total bust. Serendipity, in fact, shimmered at its edges. We now knew the long-sought answer to our question of what to do with our lives once we left the computer industry. We decided we wanted to help ourselves and others stride into awareness of our potential. We wanted to suggest options to the worldwide belief that events are happenstance and only God can kiss it and make it better. We wanted to tell whoever cared to listen that this is supposed to be fun, that we all have the inherent ability to soar into our dreams…just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

"Excellent . . . evocative. Lynda's work helps us consciously focus on our creative journeys as we grapple with the mysteries of life."

"A book that can help you reorder your thinking and create a new life."

"Lynda Dahl provides one of the most clear and simple guides to using the power of our thoughts, attitudes and beliefs to change our lives. I highly recommend this book…"

"A wonderful book, written simply and clearly about letting go of self-imposed limitations."

"This is a wonderful book for all those who found The Celestine Prophecy fascinating . . . Some will find it life-changing."