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A Conversation With Hale Dwoskin

by Bill Harris, Centerpointe Research Institute

BILL HARRIS:  Hello. This is Bill Harris, and I want to  welcome you to the Masters of the Secret Series. Tonight’s  guest is my good friend Hale Dwoskin.

Hale is one of the  stars of the hit DVD movie, The Secret, and is also the  President of Sedona Training Associates and author of  several books, including Happiness is Free.

Hale is quite  an amazing person, and I think you’re going to really  enjoy this conversation. Hale, thanks for being here. 

HALE DWOSKIN:  Oh my pleasure. 

BILL HARRIS:  Why don’t you start off just by telling  people a little bit of biographical information about who  you are and how you got to where you are now and then  we’ll take it from there. 

HALE DWOSKIN:  Oh, sure, sure.  I’ve been doing this  work around the Sedona Method since 1976 when I  met my mentor, Lester Levenson.

And Lester was a  physicist engineer, who back in 1952, was sent home  and given a few weeks to live after having a secondary  coronary. 

I mean, a second coronary, and the  coronary was just one of many physical and emotional  problems that he was dealing with. 

He was a physical  and emotional basket case, but rather than give up,  he decided to go back to the lab within himself and  he started a process of self-inquiry, which led him  to a series of radical discoveries. 

And the two that  were most profound to me and to the vast majority of  people that have been studying his work since then,  is that we are all unlimited and we are limited only by the concepts of limitation that we hold in mind.  

And these concepts of limitation manifest for most  of us consciously as our thoughts and feelings and  our beliefs. But what Lester also discovered is that  this way of thinking and feeling and believing is not  immutable. 

We all have this natural ability to let go  of these unwanted emotions, these unwanted thoughts  and feelings and beliefs quite easily. 

And when he  discovered this, he used it intensely on himself, and  over the space of three months he went into a state of  profound peacefulness that he lived in another 42 years  after doctors just gave him weeks to live. 

BILL HARRIS:  Wow that’s pretty amazing.  Was Lester  at all interested in Eastern philosophy? 

I mean, what  he came up with is described almost exactly the way he  describes it in Buddhism and Hinduism and Taoism and  a number of other mystical ways of describing reality.  

Was he aware of any of that or did he come up with it on  his own? 

HALE DWOSKIN:  Well the interesting things with Lester  is, he was an ardent materialist, a physicist engineer  before this whole experience and he had purposely  avoided those type of studies, because if he couldn’t  prove it in a lab he didn’t even want to discuss it. 

But  his view changed 180 degrees, well, actually 360o.   Just turned around after he had this experience and  afterwards, what was the most solid to him were the  things that they referred to in the East as the underlying  truth of our being, and afterwards that was much more  solid than his solid, physical reality was up until that  point.

So, he actually said that he was fortunate that he  didn’t have a lot of background in all of these Eastern  teachings, because he may have understood them  intellectually, but not had them experientially.  

BILL HARRIS:  Well, you know, there have been a  number of things that I have intuited or discovered or  figured out that I later then read in Buddhist writings or  something and I thought, “Oh, somebody else figured  this same thing out.”

So, I just wondered if Lester had  the experience and figured out a way to describe it and  then later, like I did, read about it in some sort of Eastern  text or if he was even aware of those things. 

HALE DWOSKIN:  Oh yes, what happened was actually  is that Lester was not part of any lineage or had never  studied metaphysics or spirituality before, and he had no  language to even describe what he was experiencing just  being at rest or at bliss all the time. 

So he did start asking  people to try to help him to discover a way of describing  what he’d discovered. And the first place he looked was  the Bible and that was short-lived because he couldn’t  find adequate language in the Bible. 

There were some  things that he felt were really accurate, but there were  other things that he thought had been codified or hidden. 

But as he kept exploring, he came to the conclusion that  what he had discovered was the closest to the teachings  of teachers from the East, like Ramana Maharshi  and Paramhansa Yogananda and also very similar to  Buddhism.

But this was after the fact that he discovered  that his discoveries so paralleled what the teachers in  these other traditions had discovered. 

BILL HARRIS:  Now, you mentioned that he had discovered  that we were all unlimited and we were limited by the mind  essentially. 

In Buddhism and Hinduism they talk about  there being this pure awareness or pure unity with God, or  something that’s kind of a background to everything and  that’s who we really are, but that people don’t generally  perceive that or have that experience because their mind  gets in the way. 

They create a conceptual map of reality, is  the way that I describe it, and as long as they are focused  is it shows people how to let go of all the conflicting  thoughts and feelings that are distracting from this  underlying unity and also distracting from the harmony  and abundance and joy and all of the good things that  are available to us, even in living. 

Even when we are  focused on the diversity of life, most of us experience  a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering because  where the unity always is there to support and guide  us and to help us have whatever our genuinely positive  desires are, but we obstruct that through the noise of  the mind. 

So, what the Sedona Method does is as you  use the Sedona Method, it continually quiets your mind  to the point where your mind is quiet most of the time  whether or not you are even doing the process. 

It very  much has the same effect as maybe an hour meditation  sometimes in minutes once you really perfect the process  because these underlying limitations, thoughts, feelings  and beliefs are what keep the mind from being at rest.  

And so, what the Sedona Method does is it takes those  things out of your awareness, actually, it shows you how  to do it, and then it allows you to just be more and more  aware of this underlying unity or whatever else you want  to call it. 

There are so many terms and none of them I  think are particularly accurate.  They’re still at the level  of map or menu as opposed to the actual experience. 

BILL HARRIS:  Well and there’s really no way to describe  that unity experience really because it’s really the words,  the concepts, all of those things, that get in the way of  having it.  So to step back into the words and concepts to  try to explain it really removes you from it.  

HALE DWOSKIN:  Exactly.  

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This is an excerpt from a longer interview
in the free online course
The Masters of The Secret
from Centerpointe Research Institute.
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Hale Dwoskin is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, The Sedona Method: Your Key to Lasting Happiness, Success, Peace and Emotional Well-being.

Hale is one of the 24 Teachers from the movie The Secret and a founding member of the Transformational Leadership Council.

He is the CEO and Director of Training of Sedona Training Associates .
 

The Sedona Method Self Improvement Course

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Jack Canfield

"Through my work with Chicken Soup for the Soul and through my Self-Esteem Seminars, I have been exposed to many self-improvement techniques and processes. This one stands head and shoulders above the rest for the ease of its use, its profound impact, and the speed with which it produces results.

"The Sedona Method is a vastly accelerated way of letting go of feelings like anger, frustration, jealousy, anxiety, stress, and fear, as well as many other problems even physical pain with which almost everybody struggles at one time or another."

Jack Canfield, Co-Creator of the #1 New York Times best-selling series Chicken Soup for the Soul and the author of The Success Principles
 
Mariel Hemingway

"The Sedona Method is by far the most powerful way to make big changes in all aspects of your life through the simple act of 'letting go.'

"In the beginning it feels so easy that one feels the need to make it more complicated than it actually is.  That is the perfect time to surrender and trust that some great things just get to be easy."

Mariel Hemingway, actress and author of Finding My Balance
 


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