EXCERPT 1
THE OLD WORLD IS COLLAPSING AROUND US. THE PERSONAL, THE INTERPERSONAL, THE MATERIAL, THE ENVIRONMENTAL, AND THE POLITICAL—THEY ARE ALL NOW IN A STATE OF FLUX, OF VOLATILITY, OF CHANGE.
We are facing a new world, a world we have never known before. A world in which the familiar laws and traditional perceptions will no longer be of help to us. A world in which the conventional differences between the economic-business-material and the spiritual is no longer valid. We are facing a world in which the spiritual and the material come together. The old world is collapsing around us. Not all at once, but in a process that started several years ago and is now reaching its climax. Like a wound that needs to be cleansed in order to heal, this climax is also accompanied by pain and suffering, by an infection that must be purged. This purging burns, causes pain, but this pain is essential. So that we can begin anew, we need to cleanse ourselves from what we do to ourselves, from what we do to each other, from what we do to our environment and to our world. The ever-growing aggression, the erupting wars, the collapsing economy, the poisoned air, the hostile media, the raging epidemics—allthe plagues of the world are our infection. It is from these that we must free ourselves and heal ourselves in order to reach the new, the clean, the altered.
For too long humanity has acted with an outrageous lack of responsibility. We lost our balance and shifted our world out of balance. We wanted everything for ourselves. We failed to look at the overall picture and did not take into consideration those with whom we share the world—other human beings, living creatures, the earth and its resources, the entire planet. We focused only on ourselves. We tookeverything for granted and thought that the world was meant to serve us, that everything in it was created for us,and that all of it would still be here tomorrow. This arrogance has led us to the point where we are destroying our world—in every way, and not just environmentally—with our very own hands.
I believe we must understand that if we want change, we must create change. It is not in the hands of governments,nor in the hands of leaders or gurus, nor in the hands of the powerful or the wealthy. It is in our hands, the hands of each and every one of us. All of us have a share in the future, at every level: personally, interpersonally, politically,economically, and environmentally. Everyone must focus on his or her part, whether they are businesspeople or farmers, high-tech workers or schoolteachers. We must find our essence, to understand, to accept, and to respect first ourselves and then the Other, to contribute our part.
For most of my life I have received messages—images and worded communications, sometimes even in an ancient language—that come to me from above. In the past, I used the help of channelers who interpreted the messages for me, but today I know how to receive those messages directly, without the need for interpretation, without the inevitablebias that takes place when information passes through someone else’s filters (to stress this point, I use in this book two different words to describe the same phenomenon: “channeling”—given to me by another, and “message”—communicated to me directly).
About two years ago, I received a message in which I was told to prepare myself for an impending collapse. My response was not economic; I did not rush to sell my assets in order to prevent losses or try to make a profit. My only response was to continue with even greater determination on my path, on the path that I and the companies in the Arison Group have followed in recent years: a powerful and decisive process aimed at realizing the Group’s vision.
My purpose in this book is to share the path I have traveled, in the spiritual realm and in the business realm, to share the insights I have reached regarding the essential connection between the two, to speculate as to the nature of the new world we are approaching, and to reveal my business spiritual model—a new model for a new world, which will enable individuals, companies, and even states and nations to transform the collapse all around us into change, and to bring together the spiritual and the material, and from this meeting, give birth to a new future.
*The above is an excerpt from Birth: When the Spiritual and the Material Come Together by Shari Arison Phoenix Books (November 2009). To read more go to: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1607477254
To learn more about Shari Arison and The Arison Group go to: www.arison.com
EXCERPT 2
LIKE A RESEARCHER WHO DEDICATES HIS OR HER LIFE TO AN EFFORT TO HEAL ILLNESSES OR DISCOVER NEW STARS, I SEE MYSELF AS A RESEARCHER. A researcher of the self. My research deals with consciousness, essence, and the discovery of new ways to reach them. There are countless paths for learning the lessons of life, and I have walked on many of them. Some of them are rocky and hard, some have many traffic lights, and some are like highways. All of these paths have ultimately led me to myself. But even on the fastest roads, the path is not easy. There are many challenges along the way, and you need patience, willpower, and faith to regroup and continue on, even if you fall—and always, at some stage, you will fall because there is nothing perfect except for God.
And when we become perfect, we will finally be united with God. Our goal in this life is to try to achieve perfection, try to transform, and there are many transformations to be made. When one ends, we move on to the next one.
Am I a religious person? Some say that I am more religious than religious people. But in my eyes, religion and spirituality are two different things. I believe that religion, as an institution, is divisive. We must rise above religions and see that we are all in fact one. We are all part of the same whole. It is possible to be a religious person without being connected to oneself, to one’s essence. And it is possible to be a non-religious person who is very connected, and vice versa. The meaning of this connection is closeness to and acquaintance with the divine spark that is within each and every one of us, the spark that is the source, the essence and inner beauty. The family in which I grew up, for example, was very secular but also extremely Jewish. And I have always been connected to the Jewish tradition and to a feeling that Judaism has a mission to fulfill in this world, that we can bring tikkun olam (transformation) to the world.
Around the year 1996, I met a channeler who told me that everything we know is about to change, and that I have a role in what is about to unfold, that I am destined to lead the people of Israel. It was very difficult for me to hear this, and I did not really understand what she meant. But during the ensuing years, after many other things she told me about my businesses and my late father’s businesses came to fruition, and after much inner consciousness work that I did with myself, I have learned to accept the future she saw for me.
Today, I believe that I do indeed have a mission in this world, a mission to lead and to guide. Not out of vanity and not from political aspiration—but out of the understanding that I have the tools to bring change to the world, and that I have the ability to envision this change, to see the vision of the new world, and to influence people. And that I can use my personal example to show the way. Even during my childhood, I always felt ill at ease in the world. I felt that perhaps I did not belong, that something in me or in the world was wrong and lacking. I already knew then, even before I could put my feelings into words, that we had lost our way. The violence, the suffering, the cruelty that I saw in the world were immense, and I felt that they were contrary to the true essence of humanity. To our divine essence. As I grew up, I understood that although I felt out of place, my mission—my purpose in life, the reason for my existence—was to help people, humanity, the world, to reach the true essence.
Today I feel the old collapsing within me. I feel that while great transformations occur in the world, an enormous change is also happening within me. All of the feelings of guilt, insult, loneliness, lack of self-esteem, lack of confidence, sadness, depression, pain—all these are collapsing within me and are being released, making room for understanding and tranquility, for self-acceptance, for freedom and abundance, for love. I have always believed and felt that the external reality is a reflection of me, of us, of each of us. And therefore, the external collapse we see around us is also an internal collapse. And if we learn how to reach our true essence, this will also be reflected in our external reality.
I began my emotional and spiritual journey as a frightened and angry child who did not know how to express her feelings. I grew up in a home where emotions were not dealt with, or talked about, in which I felt my own emotions were being suppressed and denied. It took me years to find my voice and begin using it. Even then, I had a great sensitivity for what is to come. I felt and sometimes saw things before they happened, and I felt a great connection with what lies beyond the simple everyday reality. When I tried to tell people about the things I experienced, they did not believe me and told me, “There are no such things.” The gap between what I knew to be the truth, which I saw with my eyes and felt in my body, and the lack of faith of the people around me, generated a difficult feeling within me that only years later I was able to identify as fear.
This sensitivity and differentness, especially in a family like mine that was not attentive to these matters, generated friction and problems during my childhood and youth, and my parents turned to conventional psychology to try to find solutions. My first encounter with therapy was traumatic: a psychologist who treated me violated the privilege between us and spoke with my mother about the issues we had discussed during our sessions.
Other encounters were no less difficult: I was ten years old when my father remarried, and there was great anger within me that I did not know how to handle. I wanted to kill my stepmother. I actually sat and planned how I would get rid of her. At age twelve, my parents took me for treatment to a psychologist who specialized in the Gestalt method, a very dramatic and shocking technique for me. In our first session, the therapist lay on the floor and invited me to kill her. “Kill me!” she told me. “Show me how you would kill me. You can choke me if you want. Show me how you’re going to do it.” Of course, I could not do anything, and the shock of the incident completely dissolved my anger. “One day,” she told me, “you will have to deal with your fears.” At the time, I did not understand what she meant because, as I said, I couldn’t identify the feelings I experienced as fears. In the fullness of time I came to understand what she meant.
Today, of course, I have a wonderful relationship with Lin, my father’s widow, and we love and respect each other very much. These experiences taught me to be suspicious of psychology. The trust that was violated and the shock of the Gestalt therapy left a deep mark within me, created layers, a scar tissue in my soul. This fear, however, did not prevent me from taking great interest in the field, and I even considered studying psychology at one point, before I started college in the United States. I did not lose this curiosity, and when I returned to Israel in the summer of 1991, I studied psychology at the Open University. The experience I had undergone, and what I had managed to learn about the field, made it clear to me that while conventional treatment is beneficial to some people, I am not one of them. I do not reject any method, of course. But I think that each method should be adapted to the individual.
In my twenties, following crises in my personal life, I began to participate in support groups. For the first time in my life, I was part of a group of people who struggled with problems that were similar to mine, and I learned a lot about mutual support. I participated in sessions for a very long time, and they helped me to understand that I am not alone and that I must accept responsibility for my part in whatever difficult situation I am in. At the time, I could only understand the importance of this responsibility rationally. I was very young. I cannot say that I truly understood it in depth, because during the course of my life I found myself repeating the same mistakes over and over and over, and I am still struggling with them today, but in other ways.
There are things in our lives that we understand better at every stage we pass. But the beginning of my path, my initial learning of responsibility, I did there, in the support groups. After Jason, my eldest son, was born, I began to develop profound fears, very severe phobias. The maternal, protective impulse transformed the fears I had experienced since my childhood, which only now I could identify, into phobias. When I was alone, I could cope with the fear. I could tell myself that even if something happened to me, it would not be so terrible. But the moment the children were born, everything became more frightening. My maternal instinct was so overwhelming that I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of crowded places. I would go to a movie theater or enter a supermarket, and if there were too many people around me, I would become stressed and faint. The doctors told me that I had hypoglycemia and low blood pressure— my soul and my body worked in tandem. I was afraid of heights. If we climbed a mountain on a trip, I would become hysterical. The worst phobia concerned flying. Even today, after I have done a great amount of work with myself in this area, I think and calculate thousands of times before I decide to fly. But back then my condition was much more severe.
All my life, I have flown very frequently between the United States and Israel, and my life has been split between these two places. But nonetheless, I did not board a plane during the first five years of Jason’s life. I could not. I was scared to death. Hypnosis enabled me to attempt to fly, but it did not solve the problem. I would sit fifteen hours in coach class with three small children, clutching the seat and crying. I explained to the children that they should not talk to me because I could not cope with the fear. I often wondered what power compelled me to continue to try, and today I know that I have enormous willpower that has accompanied me throughout life and enabled me to improve, to change, to succeed, and in particular—to come to Israel.
*The above is an excerpt from Birth: When the Spiritual and the Material Come Together by Shari Arison Phoenix Books (November 2009). To read more go to: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1607477254
To learn more about Shari Arison and The Arison Group go to: www.arison.com
Birth: Where the Spiritual and the Material Come Together by Shari Arison