Living Your Dream Not Someone Else's

By James Nussbaumer

In the personal research I have done in writing this book, I lived and saw the effects of stress and loss and fear while learning the importance of self-control, self-awareness, and connectedness. The men I have lived among behind bars in prison have taught me lessons that they don’t realize they are teaching me. It’s what I most needed to know. Besides them, there are those few family members and friends who have supported me and have kept my hope alive for living my own dream come true.
Yes, at this moment I am inking (with pen) these words into a composition journal from a prison cell, where the words will next find their way to typing and editing then to publication. I can see my work one day being in your hands.
I’ll be honest in saying that I didn’t write this book as being an acclaimed spiritual guru, only as a man who has always been searching for what the world could not teach me. My expertise does not prevail from years of contentment and having things fall my way, but actually more so from being an individual who always sought for goodness of heart in myself and in others, while having my own share of errors. My thoughts extend to you in the form of these words from a man who talked himself down from many emotional ledges. In prison, every moment is a struggle just to keep the chains of oppression unlocked.
Leo Tolstoy wrote that “Each time of life has its own kind of love.” At this time in my life those who are behind me are my true riches. Margaret Mead once suggested that the deepest dream coming true for humans is to have someone who cares that we make it home safe.
I recall an old grocery store owner serving a sentence of thirty years to life, for a murder he says he did not commit. He’d already served thirty-three years when attending a parole board hearing. They gave him a definite release date of twelve more years, and he was elated. A dream come true just knowing he had a release date to look forward to. His toothless smile with gray whiskers told me his children will be pleased. He was now seventy-six.
Those of you that know me understand how grateful I feel, in here, for only having to deal with the simple securities violation that landed me ten years by an “example-setting” judge, of which I’ve been told I will not fully serve. I cannot fathom an entire life in prison. Could you?
These men mostly of who serve life sentences that I live among have given me high expectation of myself that I want to extend on to you. It is what A Course in Miracles calls “The power of turning any situation that is not of love back into love, by thinking differently.”
Every day an urge inside me suggests what I need to do, which is to be fully present and to patiently not waste time. I want every moment of time while in here spent writing, studying, exercising, or being helpful. My time in prison is almost over and for that I am thankful. During this brief time—a pit stop, so to speak—the voice within me suggests I see things this way: Life goes on, so I’ve decided that as long as I am living I might as well live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ozark Mountain Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005007645

James Nussbaumer

Jim Nussbaumer composed his first novel – a football saga – at age eleven on the shiny turquoise typewriter he found under the Christmas tree. The book was entitled Reaching for the Goal. While his life has taken many turns since then, his focus on the Quest has never wavered.Following tours of duty at Kent State University and in the U.S. Air Force, he spent the next twenty-five years in the financial services industry, excelling in a field he loathed – though not immune to its perks. By his thirties, running his own independent agency, he became an experienced public speaker and wrote a monthly column on financial security for Senior Forum, a regional Ohio newsletter. He then launched his own monthly client newsletter, Retirement Insights, which became hugely popular and evolved into a self-help publication with a nontraditional, nonreligious, spiritual slant.Despite a long, successful career, in 2007 – faced with the pressures of an economy in freefall; the loss of one wife to cancer and two to divorce; the needs of his children and demands of an upscale lifestyle; and responsibilities to panicking clients – he illegally withdrew $100,000 of client’s funds to try to recoup the value of their investments and rescue his floundering business. The strategy failed and landed him a sentence of ten years.His time in prison had been hell, and had also been unexpectedly fruitful, resulting in his return to his first love, writing, and the series that begins with The Master of Everything. The manuscripts were painstakingly handwritten in lined notebooks (he didn’t have a computer available in prison) and the material just keeps on coming.

Book preview

Table of Contents

© 2020 by James Nussbaumer

Introduction

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part II

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Part III

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part IV

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Part V

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Bibliography

About the Author

Living Your Dream, Not Someone Else’s

© 2020 by James Nussbaumer

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic, photographic or mechanical, including photocopy- ing, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from Ozark Mountain Publishing, Inc., except for brief quotations embodied in literary articles and reviews.

For permission, or serialization, condensation, adaptions, or for our catalog of other publications, write to: Ozark Mountain Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 754, Huntsville, AR 72740, ATTN: Permissions Department

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Living Your Dream, Not Someone Else’s by James Nussbaumer -1957-

Readers of Living Your Dream, Not Someone Else’s will learn, through lessons illustrated by person- al anecdotes and stories that guilt and fear literally means a bad dream.

1. Spiritual 2. Power of Thought 3. Manifesting 4. Metaphysical

I. Nussbaumer, James, 1957 II. Metaphysical III. Manifesting IV. Title

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2020940826

ISBN: 9781940265810

Cover Art and Layout: Victoria Cooper Art

Book set in: Times New Roman, Calisto MT

Book Design: Summer Garr

Published by:

PO Box 754, Huntsville, AR 72740

800-935-0045 or 479-738-2348; fax [phone] WWW.OZARKMT.COM

Printed in the United States of America

To all of those who feel like giving up on life, I’ve written this with

intent that you will come to know your inward beauty.

The world needs you. I need you.

You’re like a wonderful river, an ocean, and the stars in the night’s sky.

Also to my three daughters, Erin, Megan, and Kacy:

Your beauty has proven to me what a glorious universe we possess.

How could anything originate out of its opposite?

For example, truth out of error? Or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? Or the generous deed out of selfishness? Or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness?

Such genesis is impossible.

—Friedrich Nietzche

Introduction

When a psychologist recommends therapy, some people might be worried about the stain of one’s reputation. I am going through a time where the time is itself a therapy. It is grueling and rigorous. It is where I face fear, tension, and hatred head-on every day. And guess what? It is diminishing or fading away bit by satisfying bit each day from a prison cell. That’s the way I choose to see it, and as a result my dream is developing and unfolding before my eyes.

I have been a student of volumes of spiritual metaphysical principles and lessons called A Course in Miracles, which is intense self-study psychotherapy, based on many universal spiritual themes.

I say it is intense because it brings forward in the mind the real and moves out the unreal. The Course has a foundation that states, Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Each experience we have begins with a thought, and our experiences change when we change our thought. In this idea is where I have learned to find abundance in my thoughts and make them manifest in this world. I am discovering a key principle of A Course in Miracles to be all so true: Miracles occur naturally as expressions of love.

In the personal research I have done in writing this book, I lived and saw the effects of stress and loss and fear while learning the importance of self-control, self-awareness, and connectedness. The men I have lived among behind bars in prison have taught me lessons that they don’t realize they are teaching me. It’s what I most needed to know. Besides them, there are those few family members and friends who have supported me and have kept my hope alive for living my own dream come true.

Yes, at this moment I am inking (with pen) these words into a composition journal from a prison cell, where the words will next find their way to typing and editing then to publication. I can see my work one day being in your hands.

I’ll be honest in saying that I didn’t write this book as being an acclaimed spiritual guru, only as a man who has always been searching for what the world could not teach me. My expertise does not prevail from years of contentment and having things fall my way, but actually more so from being an individual who always sought for goodness of heart in myself and in others, while having my own share of errors. My thoughts extend to you in the form of these words from a man who talked himself down from many emotional ledges. In prison, every moment is a struggle just to keep the chains of oppression unlocked.

Leo Tolstoy wrote that Each time of life has its own kind of love. At this time in my life those who are behind me are my true riches. Margaret Mead once suggested that the deepest dream coming true for humans is to have someone who cares that we make it home safe.

I recall an old grocery store owner serving a sentence of thirty years to life, for a murder he says he did not commit. He’d already served thirty-three years when attending a parole board hearing. They gave him a definite release date of twelve more years, and he was elated. A dream come true just knowing he had a release date to look forward to. His toothless smile with gray whiskers told me his children will be pleased. He was now seventy-six.

Those of you that know me understand how grateful I feel, in here, for only having to deal with the simple securities violation that landed me ten years by an example-setting judge, of which I’ve been told I will not fully serve. I cannot fathom an entire life in prison. Could you?

These men mostly of who serve life sentences that I live among have given me high expectation of myself that I want to extend on to you. It is what A Course in Miracles calls The power of turning any situation that is not of love back into love, by thinking differently.

My days are refreshingly overwhelming. I’m writing before sunrise all the way through till I exercise at 2 p.m., and then after supper, studying and reading till 7:30 p.m., and next calling it a night, all the while being vigilant between the prison chow hall slop and the inmate commissary. I regularly examine my goals to make certain I am using my time here well and helping others where I may, especially those who are far less fortunate. A Talmud line says: It is not incumbent on thee to finish the work, but neither art thou permitted to desist from it altogether. I’ve taped it to the inside of my footlocker.

Every day an urge inside me suggests what I need to do, which is to be fully present and to patiently not waste time. I want every moment of time while in here spent writing, studying, exercising, or being helpful. My time in prison is almost over and for that I am thankful. During this brief time—a pit stop, so to speak—the voice within me suggests I see things this way: Life goes on, so I’ve decided that as long as I am living I might as well live.

I keep thinking about that song from the 1980s, Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

Perhaps we need to redefine courage. Turn the page now and let’s move forward in both of our minds where tensions fade away and to feel revived and refreshed about living your own dream and not someone else’s.

Part I

Your Existence

Chapter 1

Like a River

Yesterday my psyche reaffirmed to me once again that I am indeed a prisoner by the state of Ohio. A medical round trip to seventy-five miles away Columbus for a doctor’s visit began at 5 am.

A dozen or so of us shackled, handcuffed and a belly chain, dressed in an orange jumpsuit labeled INMATE and loaded on a bus as a literal chain gang to Corrections Medical Center, not to return till 7 p.m. This morning my wrists and ankles still bear the red marks and slight bruising from the steel wrapped around my flesh and bones during the entire day. Only a few minutes break for a bag lunch.

Mary Sarton once wrote, There is a connection between any place where humans are helpless and a prison.

While I still struggle to depend on others, the added misery of prison bars clanging open and shut this morning continues to be even more of a slamming sore spot in my life.

But for the moment this morning’s world news sent me in awe with a photograph of a painting that sold at auction for $120 million. The struggling unknown artist titled it The Scream. This portrayal of a blue-eyed little girl standing brightly on a pier at a sandy, seaside beach with her puckered mouth and face with blond braids flapping in the coastal breeze, as sea gulls witness, becomes a bounty for life. The newspaper article acclaims this piece of work as the artist’s own rendition of the joy life is meant to be. I guess his own river of abundance that the ocean in the background has given him.

Are you like many individuals throughout history and especially today, where circumstances control your dreams and seem to define you and your life? Or, are you like the constantly rising many others in this world with a wholly truthful and honest heart about yourself? These individuals incline to flow naturally in a direction with real zest, which in itself is seen as success in a venture they have chosen that doesn’t force life on them.

Where are you at this moment? Do you feel lacking in an area, or do you feel full with a sense of substance that is deep within you, full of excitement and bliss without being anxious all the time? Is peace what you expect and what you have?

If you’re not sure about particular things in your life, consider a river teaching you everything you need to know so that you don’t fight against your naturalness, but rather trusting in every true degree of your depth. We can learn from the river that the insecurities and fears in our lives are illusory. That seemingly ever so frightening future should not naturally be a concern. The river will continue to flow along teaching us there is no such thing as death. The water trusts its current. It does not try to tell the current’s power how to direct its flow, but the water does allow itself to be pulled easily and naturally to the ocean. The river’s current has its own timing and knows for certain where it’s going. That’s why it is the current.

Can you picture the twigs bobbing merrily along the surface as well as the driftwood drifting along for the joy ride? As I imagine myself sitting alongside its protective bank, it looks like the same river Mark Twain created as Huck Finn’s home.

The fish certainly trust all that the current brings them. The water itself is the river and naturally hears a calling by its own likeness. The ocean where the current constantly leads to needs its rivers flowing. This is how we are led to reality when we trust our own current, our true free will as a gift to us by our Source, leading us to the fullest and happiest expression of life. The expression itself we extend is our artwork, if you will; our dream to live.

The Source many have named God. But let’s not get caught up in the form of letters in the alphabet, rather the real meaning lies behind the projection of a word.

The Natural Key for Releasing Fear

Words are forms of thought made to express an idea. The natural idea of trusting in yourself is your key to release the foundation of fear. You will want to with ease let go of your very first fearful thought because it leads to a war with yourself that cannot be won. You will learn in this book that this is the thought upon which each subsequent fearful thought builds itself.

For now see the first fearful thought you have over anything as marking the beginning of delusional thinking—the unreal, which doesn’t exist. Try to keep in mind as we move along as stated in the introduction to this book: Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Unreal, delusional thinking is the foundation for an illusory thought system. This influences and controls our perceptions of the world, ourselves, and our Definition, which is of God. If our true definition is of God, am I trying to say that each of us, ourselves, are this Oneness?

If you are thinking this way you are off to a good start even if part of you thinks this is an arrogant thought. That’s okay, please bear with me, but as you do try to carefully consider the key to the release of fear. Try to see in your mind where the first ever, fearful, untrue, and illusive thought came from. In this world there always seems to be a first for everything. It is the very first thought ever influenced by a separate notion that builds thoughts and holds our beliefs.

Consider the mind as being beyond the body’s brain. Nonphysical, it is whole. A small, tiny portion, an extremely micro segment of mind had a nanosecond of thought it may be lacking something. To have a thought of something other than what you are would indicate a splitting away from its wholeness. The split would continue to fragment over and over kind of like how rumors form to spread even more gossip. Since splitting was occurring, another thought called time had to be formed and this process of fragmentation and separation compounded into a thought system. That first thought had an insecure idea that its mind was separate, with all its other fragmented parts, from God. This became the theme of this new thought system that would later form a name called human consciousness.

This so-called yet non-whole consciousness, or conscious mind, continued forming perceptions that were notions, not knowledge, that gave birth to additional thoughts. These were thoughts that were totally separate from our Source—the Oneness of Creation, or God. We call this separateness formed out of thoughts of lack, humanity. But who decided on this lack? Nothing did, and that is the illusion of this world.

However, the pre-time, original, and real wholeness created of the one thought of Love, the Real Consciousness, remains unchanged and is forever one reality. The micro segment that only thinks it became divided dreams of all this separateness; it is only a runaway thought, errant in nature, that has dozed off or a daydream of sort that thinks of life.

Think of a child in school gazing out the classroom window with fantasy thoughts, while much of his mind can still hear the teacher in the background. He senses that safe and living environment as real, but dreams of hitting that home run on the ball field, or with little Suzy. It’s unreal, a dream. Yet the reality of his being is with the love and care of the teacher.

The Big Bang

The first separated thought of lack triggered on explosion of other thoughts that had a strive for something, an intention. This unreal occurrence is what is commonly referred to by scientists as the Big Bang, which gave birth to the new time-ticking, separate consciousness. Thinking of time itself as being real, it made a continual flow of time so it could further its projections of guilt. I mean the kind of guilt for having such ridiculous perceived notions to begin with. Even the thought of being ridiculous was a bothersome ridiculous stream of guilt that plagued the separated consciousness. Images expanded just as rumors travel today, and these images became the birth of an image called mankind. As more and more thought split and fragmented in this explosion of guilt, like cells splitting under a microscope, separate images massively came onto the scene, and they projected differently with a theme that no two were exactly alike. In other words, what I see, you see less, greater, bigger, smaller, pleasant, unpleasant, and differently even if in the slightest of degree. A separate world for each, an unreal one, that arrived where separate projected images threatened each other.

Humankind, not as a whole, but collectively, became caught up in a dream of sort of separate false wholes, indecisive thought that developed a man-made consciousness that supports the denial of the truly real thought system of Love.

Denial has become another way of holding on to old unreal pictures long after they have faded away, only to hide from the fear of guilt for doing so. Mary Pipher, in her book Another Country, asks us to think how incidents in our lives trigger the reaction, We must do something. Awkwardly and reluctantly, the issues are faced. Denial is temporarily not a problem. We make plans to fit the current situation. Things go pretty smoothly until there is another incident, then chaos emerges, which has its own set of laws. We’ll touch on this in understanding detail coming a bit later on.

Yet being unreal, having a false foundation, then accumulating more splitting thought that has been illusively perceived from this foundation has made a world of images. Take away this belief that the images are real and everything it supports crumbles.

Just as every river has a current, so does every building have its cornerstone. But if the cornerstone is not real, made of fabrication, there is no need to release all the surrounding blocks of fearful beliefs. They will in time simply tumble.

The cornerstone of humankind is structured in fantasy, a false idea, a dream of having a mind separate from God’s Mind. It is a belief in a separate identity from our Source. It is a worrisome errant thought of lack making our own currents for own separate rivers. Try to see this thought of lack, the physical world, as a projected image of what we think is a free will, but don’t know for certain. I mean developed from our self-made consciousness onto a theater screen, so to speak, behind, on the other side of the screen, is our true reality. The screen is put up to hide the guilt where it projects images you only dream are true. The dream covers up true reality.

What we continually see as a projection we think is our real identity. We like to say, denial. Your perceptions and thoughts of these images are like seeing your consciousness in a mirror, and a body is formed before your dreaming eyes. How else would you be aware of what you think you look like? As we change our thoughts, the physical world around us shifts to reflect that change. This reflection could be positive or negative, what we will shift to perceiving as a right-minded or wrong-minded fashion, your personal life can be transformed in either one of two ways.

In the right-minded approach to seeing the world around you, you are able to sense the reality behind the projection screen. You are alert to it and can sense truth and maintain it as your chosen cornerstone, while the dream plays itself out. But in the more wrong- minded way of seeing life and the world, you will continue to wish for fantasy, calling it truth when actually it is an untruth. We begin believing this is our journey, covering up guilt and sinking deeper into the dream itself, called ego.

But ego in this sense has another take to it than what the therapist will counsel you about by analyzing the darkness in your life. We’re not meaning egocentric, although the ego-based mind does lead you to that type of behavior. Rather, ego is the total of right- and wrong-mindedness, but right-minded thought and perceptions will allow some truth to shed its light onto the scene. Wrong-mindedness won’t consider true light at all, but in time the right-mind has a goal of shifting the mass consciousness bit by satisfying bit with the influence of truth.

What we must look at here is that it’s our choice in how humankind becomes weighted in either direction; a world of righteousness outweighing its opposite. Do we choose real zest and truth, or do we tilt toward a life of fantasy and total falsehood with pain and suffering? How do you want to live? By projecting thoughts that lack truth and sincerity making more guilty images to tend with in your mind? Or would you rather extend reality by reflecting the Oneness of your Source?

Let’s take a close look.

Truth Extends

By operating from the truth, the rightfully minded, well- intended individuals want only what is real. That’s because they always sense the reality of wholeness beyond the fantasy thought system. In other words, it is your choice to extend your unseparated, real consciousness, rather than projecting images of the man-made, ego-based lacking version. You can remain alerted to your true reality when you operate from wholeness, which is from your true deep inner core.

Here, realness is whispered into your dreaming state of mind from the current of truth. Being within wholeness, in touch with reality, we think along with God as His extension, and not separate from Him. This is how you maintain His definition of who you are. Your life is real and not some fantasy. This is how we are one with our Source like the river is to the current and on to the ocean. Or, we can say, In His likeness.

In this sense of who you are, you thereby trust and follow your true essence, the background music, the beat, which is the current for what is most appropriate for you. The world will follow. You will learn throughout this book it is your world. You call the shots.