Be There Now: Sequel to the Self-Empowerment Trilogy

By Tolly Burkan

Tolly Burkan teaches us how to “PAY ATTENTION 100%,” and to take responsibility for the outcomes in our lives. When Tolly teaches, you are confronted with the profound truth, that
you are creating your own reality. He himself has survived many intense life challenges, including two young adult suicide attempts, followed by electro- shock therapy treatments, then cancer, and a broken neck. From these intensely traumatic experiences, Tolly has gained a powerful understanding of how you can use challenges in life as gifts, from which to learn and grow spiritually.

Despite the tumultuous events of his adolescence and early manhood, his own teachers taught him how to live again. Tolly’s personal evolution has resulted in his special understanding of life, and he puts this in his books.

In Be There Now, his message is one of living in the now, practicing daily gratitude, and giving up the redundant, painful and happiness-preventing sludge that stops us from becoming who we were born to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483571713

Tolly Burkan

Tolly Burkan is known as the father of the international firewalking movement. As a result of his pioneering strategies, firewalking seminars are now offered on six continents, and have been taught to more than two million people During the 1970s, Tolly created innovative, cutting-edge methods for developing human potential and created the world's first firewalking class. In the 1980s, he founded the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education, started working with large corporations, and began training instructors. The 1990s saw his firewalking.com transform his work into a mushrooming corporate trend. A renowned motivational speaker, Tolly Burkan has coached celebrities, including Andrew Weil, MD, Geraldo Rivera, and Anthony Robbins (who later went on to be the most well known firewalking instructor). In addition to authoring three books that are available in several languages, Tolly has been featured in thirty books, hundreds of magazines and newspapers, and on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Book preview

how.

Part One

Everything we experience in life is just temporary. It ends when we do. What we call reality is actually only a virtual reality. It has rules and laws that govern it – like cause and effect – but it ends. What happens next is the stuff that religions are made of. It’s all just imagination, and it differs from place to place. Even thinking will never get us to the Truth. The best we can do is use the mind to go beyond the mind. However, there is one thing we can all agree about: Before this, there was a PRIOR STATE. I used to yearn to return to that – but now I know I am already there. I don’t intuit this, or comprehend it, but am consciously aware.

—Tolly Burkan

My Self-Empowerment Trilogy covered just about everything I want to pass on to make your path toward spiritual enlightenment as easy as possible. However, there are a few more points I’d like to add, and will include them in this Sequel.

If you are reading this book before reading any of the others, you will still receive tremendous value. The picture on the cover is an adaptation of a famous work known as Ezekiel’s Vision. It depicts someone piercing the veil between reality and the virtual reality in which we live, and most perceive as the only reality. However, there are many dimensions. We already know that a huge portion of the universe is invisible: gamma rays, radio waves, subatomic particles...

Before the beginning, before the Big Bang, there was a prior state, and everything is still contained within it. Some call it God, or consciousness, or Gaia – but it is beyond words, concepts or forms. It is the great mystery. Most people do not have time to contemplate this, or to explore spiritual enlightenment. Everyday life is filled with so many distractions.

Therefore, this book has two parts. Part One will assist you in dealing with the distractions daily routines usually entail. Part Two will give you a taste of what life can be like when you truly focus on exploring consciousness.

In Extreme Spirituality, Book Two of my trilogy, I spoke about understanding versus realization. I used the comparison between understanding how to drive a stick-shift before getting into a car…but then, the first time you actually start using a stick-shift, there is a period of time as your understanding transitions into realization. All the radical processes described in Extreme Spirituality are meant to assist you in remembering that you are a spiritual being, which gives you the power to literally create your own reality. You may very well understand this after reading Extreme Spirituality, but now I am going to ask you to start behaving as if you have already transitioned into realization.

As it has been for many reading this book, life has not always been easy for me. Readers must remember that I twice tried to kill myself when I was in my early twenties. I was a very confused, depressed, self-destructive young man who was so overwhelmed by my own self-doubt that I could not endure the struggles of life another day.

Today, at age 68, I am so happy and fulfilled, it is almost impossible to believe that I am the same person. How I got from Point A to Point B resembles what author Marilyn Ferguson described as four stages of growth. First comes ENTRY POINT. This can be any experience that awakens you to the possibility of a more enlightened state of consciousness. The next stage is EXPLORATION. This can last years. It may involve studying with a teacher, reading, spiritual disciplines such as those described in Extreme Spirituality, taking classes, or inventing your own methods. Ferguson describes the third stage as INTEGRATION. Here is where you start living the truths you’ve explored. After you yourself have integrated this new consciousness into your life, the last stage of growth is, of course, SERVICE – i.e., sharing what you have discovered.

An Invitation and a Challenge

This Sequel offers you an invitation and a challenge! You are being asked to start integrating what you are learning even before you have completed your exploration. In Extreme Spirituality, I describe a samurai warrior.

Although the samurai were fearsome killing machines, they performed their jobs because they believed that was the purpose for which they were created. And because it was also a spiritual path, they were trained never to kill when angry, to always be impeccable, and to completely surrender their wills to the will of their Lord. If they violated the Samurai Code, they would dishonor themselves; and honor was paramount. The belief was that if you lived honorably, you would be reincarnated to again be a samurai.

You might think that you yourself could never attain samurai qualities in this lifetime.

This book will reveal that you can actually start behaving as if you are a samurai.