24d (edited) • General discussion
I Have Decided. Book Update - New Section
In my book, I Have Decided, I decided not to break it into chapters because the phases I talk about are more like movements that need to happen simultaneously.
This morning I finished writing Movement 3.
I’m very pleased with how it came out and I wanted to share it with you guys:
Movement 3: Develop Inner Knowing
## The Voice Beneath the Noise
Jesus told a parable about ten bridesmaids waiting for a wedding.
In that time and place, weddings worked differently than they do now. The bridegroom would travel to the bride's village to claim his wife and bring her back to his home for the wedding feast. But travel was unpredictable. No Uber. No Google Maps. No cell phones to text "running 20 minutes late."
Sometimes the bridegroom arrived in the afternoon. Sometimes late at night. Sometimes not until the next day.
The bridesmaids' job was to be ready whenever he arrived. They would light the path with oil lamps, leading the way through the village to the bride's home, then accompanying the wedding party to the feast.
But if your lamp went out while you were waiting—if you ran out of oil—you couldn't light the path. You couldn't fulfill your role. You'd miss the wedding entirely.
So Jesus told this story:
Ten bridesmaids are waiting for the bridegroom. Five are wise—they brought extra oil for their lamps. Five are foolish—they didn't.
The bridegroom delays. Hours pass. Everyone falls asleep.
At midnight, someone shouts: "The bridegroom is coming!"
The wise bridesmaids trim their lamps. They have oil. They're ready. The foolish ones realize their lamps have gone out. They panic and run to buy more oil.
While they're gone, the bridegroom arrives. The wedding party forms. The wise bridesmaids light the path. Everyone goes in to the feast.
When the foolish bridesmaids return with their fresh oil, the door is shut. "Too late."
## WHAT THIS PARABLE ISN'T ABOUT
I grew up in evangelical churches where this parable was used as a warning about the rapture. If you didn't believe in Jesus the right way, if you weren't saved according to the proper formula, Christ would return and you'd be left behind. The door would shut. You'd be damned.
That interpretation is rooted in fear. And it completely misses the deeper teaching that's actually in the text.
This parable isn't about scaring people into correct belief. It's about readiness. About maintaining a state of inner knowing so that when your calling arrives—when the moment comes—you don't have to scramble. You're already prepared.
The evangelicals turned it into a threat. Jesus was offering a method.
## WHAT THE PARABLE IS REALLY TEACHING
The bridegroom represents your treasure—your calling, your vision, the work that's yours to do. It's the thing you identified in Movement 2. The thing you ARE when all the roles fall away.
The bridesmaids represent you—specifically, the receptive, heart-centered part of you that recognizes truth when it shows up.
The oil represents inner knowing—that quality of certainty, gratitude, joy, thankfulness that keeps you ready.
The door opening represents the moment when opportunity appears, when your next step becomes clear, when the path forward reveals itself.
And here's the key teaching: **You have to be ready before the moment arrives.**
You can't wait until you see the bridegroom coming and then try to get your lamp lit. By the time you've scrambled to generate the right feeling, to get yourself in the right headspace, to muster up the certainty—the moment has passed.
You have to maintain readiness. Keep your lamp lit. Stay in that state of inner knowing so that when the thought arises or the opportunity appears, you're already there.
Thought and feeling lock together instantly. Head and heart align. And you move.
## MASCULINE AND FEMININE ENERGY
To understand how this works, we need to talk about energy. Not in a mystical way, but in a practical way.
Everything has two aspects: masculine and feminine. Not male and female. I'm not saying men are like this and women are like that. I'm saying everything—every person, every process, every creative act—has both qualities.
**Masculine energy is thinking, directing, deciding.** It's forward-moving. Goal-oriented. Linear. It sees the target and moves toward it.
**Feminine energy is feeling, receiving, nurturing.** It's expansive. Receptive. Present. It stays open to what wants to come through.
Here's how you can feel the difference:
Imagine you have to be at work, at your desk, logged into your computer, ready to work at 8 AM sharp. You have a deadline. A hard stop. You MUST be there.
When you're operating under that constraint, you're in masculine energy. You're pushing. Driven. You take the shortest route to work. You find the most efficient way to get your coffee. You pack your lunch the night before. You have your clothes ready to go. You're thinking, planning, directing, executing.
That's masculine energy. Head energy. Forward-moving.
Now imagine it's Saturday morning and you and your partner decide to take a drive up to New Hampshire to see the fall foliage. No deadline. No agenda. You leave when you feel like it. You drive for a while. Maybe you find a nice little diner and grab some lunch. You stop at a gift shop. You wander around looking at leaves, taking pictures, visiting with each other, laughing.
That's feminine energy. Heart energy. Expansive. Receptive. Enjoying the moment instead of driving toward the goal.
These are extreme examples, and we all move between them. A mom getting three kids off to school in the morning has to be in masculine energy—boom, boom, boom, stuff's gotta get done, lead, follow, or get out of the way. That's not "acting like a man." That's just decisive, directive, forward-moving energy.
And a man can be in feminine energy. Maybe he left work early. His meeting got delayed. He stops at a donut shop for no reason. He sits in the driveway listening to the end of a story on NPR that he finds fascinating. That's receptive, expansive, enjoying-the-moment energy.
We need both. But most of us live tilted heavily toward one or the other.
## BRIDEGROOM AND BRIDE
In the parable, the bridegroom is masculine energy. He's moving. He has a destination. He's coming to claim his bride and bring her to the feast. That's your treasure—your calling, your vision, the work that's yours—moving toward you.
The bridesmaids are feminine energy. They're waiting. Receptive. Ready to receive what's coming and move with it.
And here's the cosmic principle that runs through all of creation: masculine is attracted to feminine. Feminine is attracted to masculine. Like the north and south poles of a magnet. Like the birds and the bees. That attraction—that pull—is where creative energy comes from. That's where things get made.
Your treasure is looking for you just as much as you're looking for it.
But it can only find you if you're receptive. If your lamp is lit. If you're in that feminine, heart-centered state of readiness.
If you're scrambling, grasping, forcing, pushing—pure masculine energy with no receptive counterpart—the bridegroom can't find the bride. The creative circuit doesn't close.
You have to maintain the receptive state. The oil. The inner knowing.
## WHAT INNER KNOWING ACTUALLY IS
So what is this "inner knowing" that the oil represents?
It's that quality of certainty you had as a child on Christmas morning.
Imagine you're seven years old. All year long, you've been begging your parents for a bicycle. All year long, they've been putting you off.
"Maybe. We'll see." "Bikes are expensive this year." "You could hurt yourself." "We looked, but we couldn't find any at the store." "Maybe next year."
You've heard every version of "probably not." But you kept hoping. Kept asking. Kept believing somehow that maybe, just maybe, this Christmas would be different.
Then Christmas morning comes. You walk downstairs. And there in the corner is a shape covered in wrapping paper.
Your parents didn't go buy a box. They just took wrapping paper and wrapped the handlebars. Wrapped the frame. Wrapped the wheels. It's clearly, unmistakably, the shape of a bicycle.
In that moment—before you pull the paper off, before anyone confirms it, before you know what color it is or what kind—you KNOW.
That's your bike.
You don't know everything. You don't know if it's the red one you wanted or the blue one. You don't know if it has racing stripes or a banana seat. And technically, your dad could have built some elaborate contraption out of garbage can lids and broomsticks just to mess with you—but that would be a pretty cruel father.
But underneath all that uncertainty, there's this deeper certainty: That's a bicycle. And it's mine.
No analysis. No weighing of evidence. No second-guessing. Just pure, wordless knowing.
That's the quality you're maintaining. That's the oil in your lamp.
It's gratitude. Joy. Thankfulness. Certainty. Love.
And the remarkable thing is: all those emotions feel remarkably similar in your body.
When I think about how much I love my wife, there's a sensation. A warmth. A knowing. "I love this woman." It's not a thought I'm generating—it's a felt reality.
Gratitude has that same quality. Joy. Thankfulness. Inner knowing. They're all variations on the same frequency—heart-centered, expansive, receptive, certain.
## WHY YOU MAINTAIN IT INSTEAD OF GENERATING IT
Here's the problem most people run into:
You're going through your day. Washing dishes. Mowing the lawn. Sitting in a meeting. Driving to work. Taking a shower.
And suddenly a thought arises. An insight. A flash of clarity about your treasure, about what you want, about who you're becoming, about the next step you need to take.
If you're not already in that state of inner knowing—if your lamp isn't already lit—you have to stop what you're doing and try to generate the emotion.
You have to shift gears. Get yourself into the right headspace. Muster up the feeling of gratitude or joy or certainty.
And by the time you've done that, the thought is gone.
The bridegroom arrived and you were scrambling to buy oil. The door opened and you weren't ready.
But if you maintain that state—if you keep your lamp lit with a baseline of gratitude, joy, inner knowing—then when the thought arises, you don't have to generate anything.
You just attach the existing emotion to the thought.
"Yes. This is what I want. This is who I am. This is mine."
The bridegroom and the bride meet. Masculine and feminine. Thought and feeling. Vision and receptivity.
Head and heart lock together.
And that's when you move.
## HEART-BRAIN COHERENCE
This isn't just poetic language. There's actual physiology behind it.
The HeartMath Institute has done extensive research on something called heart-brain coherence. When your heart and brain are in rhythm—when they're coherent—you access a different quality of intelligence.
Not smarter. Wiser.
Not more data. Better discernment.
Your heart generates an electromagnetic field sixty times stronger than your brain's. When your heart rate variability follows a smooth, coherent pattern—when your breathing is calm, your emotions steady, your attention focused—your heart and brain synchronize. They communicate more effectively. The field your heart generates actually influences your brain's processing.
In that state, you can distinguish between:
- Inner knowing (resonance, coherence, truth)
- Fear-based thinking (contraction, static, the opposer's voice)
- Wishful thinking (grasping, hoping, anxiety beneath the hope)
Most people live in incoherence. Heart racing, thoughts spinning, emotions reactive, nervous system on high alert. In that state, everything feels urgent, everything feels like a threat, and you can't hear the quiet voice of knowing beneath the noise.
But when you maintain coherence—when you cultivate gratitude, joy, thankfulness as your baseline state—your heart and brain work together. The static clears. The signal comes through.
That's the oil. That's keeping your lamp lit.
It's not a mood you try to force. It's a state you practice maintaining until it becomes your natural frequency.
## WHERE KNOWING LIVES
This knowing doesn't live in your head. It lives in your body.
Your solar plexus. Your heart. Your gut.
These aren't metaphors. These are actual locations where your nervous system processes information before your conscious mind can articulate it.
Your gut has more neurons than your spinal cord. These aren't just organs—they're intelligence centers.
And they know things before your mind does.
You've felt this. Someone walks into a room and something in your gut tightens. You can't explain why. Nothing overt happened. But your body knows: this person isn't safe.
Or you're sitting with a decision—two paths, both reasonable—and one of them feels open, expansive, right. The other feels contracted, heavy, wrong. Your mind can't tell you why. But your body knows.
That's inner knowing.
It's not louder than thought. It's quieter. Subtler. Easier to miss if you're only listening with your head.
But it's more reliable.
## LEARNING TO RECOGNIZE IT
Inner knowing has a specific quality:
It's calm. Steady. Quiet. Not insistent, but certain. It doesn't argue or justify or defend itself. It just IS.
Like the bicycle under the wrapping paper. You just know.
Fear-based thinking has a different quality. It's loud. Urgent. Spinning. It creates scenarios and catastrophizes and tries to convince you through volume and repetition.
"What if it doesn't work? What if you're not good enough? What if people judge you? What about that time you failed?"
That's the opposer doing its job.
Wishful thinking has yet another quality. It's grasping. Hopeful. Anxious beneath the hope. It wants something to be true so badly that it confuses desire with knowing.
"Maybe this time it'll be different. Maybe if I just try harder. Maybe if I believe hard enough."
That's not knowing either. That's hoping.
Learn to tell them apart.
**Knowing:** "This is the path."
**Fear:** "But what if it doesn't work?"
**Wishful thinking:** "Maybe this time it'll be different."
Three different voices. Three different energies. Only one is trustworthy.
## WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU'RE READY
So here's how it works in practice:
You maintain that state of gratitude, joy, inner knowing. You keep your lamp lit. Not by forcing it, but by practicing it. By returning to it. By cultivating heart-brain coherence as your baseline instead of your emergency state.
You go about your life. Working. Creating. Resting. Moving through your days.
And then the bridegroom comes.
A thought arises. An opportunity appears. Your next step becomes clear. The door opens.
And because your lamp is already lit, because you're already in that receptive state of inner knowing, you don't hesitate.
Thought meets feeling.
Head meets heart.
Masculine meets feminine.
Vision meets receptivity.
They lock together instantly.
And you walk through the door.
No scrambling. No second-guessing. No "let me think about it and get back to you."
You just know. And you move.
That's what this parable is teaching.
Not fear. Not correct belief. Not religious performance.
Readiness.
The capacity to recognize truth when it shows up and move with it immediately because you've been maintaining the state that makes recognition possible.
---
**Keep your lamp lit.**
**The bridegroom is coming.**
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I Have Decided. Book Update - New Section
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