From Van Tharp's Journey Down the Rabbit Hole
by Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.
We only recently introduced the Happiness workshop (Peak 203) as a new psychological course in the spring of this year, but we are already holding another new psychological workshop next month. Before I get into that, though, let’s talk about transformation.
At the Systems Development Workshop last weekend, about half of the attendees said that they had already received some major benefit from their association with the Van Tharp Institute (e.g., Tharp Think saved them from blowing up their account). These basics are so important to trading survival that we are likely to schedule one-day workshops on Tharp Think regularly in the future.
I am so glad that the principles we promote have helped so many traders. The comments that are particularly meaningful to me come from people who say that our workshops and home study courses (Peak Performance) have completely changed their lives. Hearing that kind of feedback inspires me and my staff. I don’t do this work for the money; I do it because of how I feel when you tell me how much of an impact we’ve had on your life. My mission has always been to help people transform themselves through a financial metaphor
I’m almost at retirement age, but as far as I’m concerned I’m already retired. I do what I love to do and my staff handles those aspects of the business that I don’t like to do. Thus, I will continue to do what I do for many years.
In addition to creating and teaching the workshops for my company, I’m forever looking for the next step that will help people more. I believe that I can’t help others transform any further than I’ve managed to transform myself. To that end, the last 30 years of my life has been a transformational journey. Let me detail some steps of that journey for you.
I have a Ph.D. in psychology; however, I don’t consider much of that education to have been transformational but it at least it gave me a baseline.
I spent four years going through the book A Course in Miracles (I’m doing it again now but with a very different perspective). This course had a major effect on me when I first completed it, although I really only understood the surface aspect of it. When I had finished, I had gone from psychologically dead to having this business that was about helping others through a financial metaphor. I didn’t know anything about running a business, but somehow I’ve managed to do this full time for about 35 years and overcame many bumps in the road.
While I was doing A Course in Miracles, I learned about NLP as the science of modeling. I completed an NLP practitioner’s course, an NLP master practitioner’s course, an NLP associate trainer’s course, a modeling course (the most valuable), and many other NLP courses. Through my NLP training, I learned many transformational techniques, and most importantly, the Science of Modeling.
In addition, I met a woman who used to be a Scientology Practitioner and had developed her own “improved” process for helping people through their issues. I did days and days of clearing work with her and actually went as far as she could take me. I’d reached the spiritual-oneness level, but I didn’t feel that much different.
I participated in the Lifespring Courses. I thought the Basic and Advanced Courses were quite inspirational. They also had a leadership course, but that seemed to be all about enrolling people in their seminars. It was quite different from the original Lifespring leadership course, which was like an outward-bound course. I didn’t finish that leadership course because I didn’t approve of what they were doing. But I read some of their recommended books and attended one weekend of the leadership course with the understanding that the course’s subject matter would be based upon one of the books I read; it wasn’t. It was still about enrolling people in their workshops. As a result, I dropped out and created the course I wanted to attend, which grew into the first version of Peak 202. Over the years, however, that course has evolved considerably from its start.
I learned numerous transformational techniques and to execute each of them correctly, I usually had to attend a workshop of some sort. I even took a Deepak Chopra meditation course.
In addition, I attended the nine-day Avatar course twice, as well as the 11-day Avatar Master’s course. I would have considered teaching it, but I was told I could only teach it under the supervision of a certified Avatar Master, so I elected not to teach it. Even still, I went on to take the 13-day Avatar Wizards course on two separate occasions.
Many years ago, I met Libby Adams at an NLP master practitioner seminar. Eight years later, I ran into her three times in one year. Now do you think running into someone like that is pure coincidence? I don’t. I learned that she had developed a transformational meditation (tfm) technique. I did several exercises with her and subsequently integrated her methods into the Peak 202 workshop. I’ve taken her 28-day TFM Course twice now and we’ve incorporated it into the Super Trader program.
Of the additional transformational work I’ve completed, Byron Katie’s 13-day School for the Work has been especially significant to me. That was an amazing course that parallels the teachings in A Course in Miracles: everything you see is a projection of what’s in your mind and thus is “not real.”
As I said before, I continue to work on my transformation because I think the more I transform myself, the more I can help you transform. Over the years I have found that transformational techniques with a strong spiritual component are the ones that tend to be life changing. Some of the other non-spiritual techniques might change your behavior but not your life.
My most significant transformational experience was a journey that started in January 2008 when I got a hands-on-my-head blessing at a local Unity church. After that blessing I felt amazingly peaceful for a while. Then, I wanted more. I got a second blessing a few months later at the blessing giver’s home and learned that she actually was channeling divine energy into me. This energy is designed to slow down the activity of the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain (i.e., temporal and spatial activity) and speed up the activity of the frontal lobe. It is this brain change that will help people “wake up.”
So what do I mean by wake up? The best way to illustrate it is through the model David Hawkins, M.D., Ph.D. discusses in his book Power Versus Force. Hawkins developed this model for his Ph.D. dissertation in psychology. Hawkins postulates that human consciousness can be measured on a log scale from zero to 1,000. Hawkins considered levels of consciousness below 200 to be self-destructive while 1,000 was the level attained by Jesus, Buddha and other great masters over the years. The log nature of the scale offers exponentially more energy at the higher levels. Hawkins said that Gandhi, a single man whose consciousness was at about 700, was able to defeat the British Army, whose consciousness was about 175, nonviolently. While the British army relied on force, Gandhi possessed power.
Hawkins said that love comes into your life at a consciousness level of 500 and that enlightenment starts at around 600. Obviously, there are many levels of enlightenment if consciousness can go to 1,000.
For most of recorded history, the consciousness of mankind has been below 200 (self-destructive) and it only since the late 1980s that things have started to change. Now I don’t know if Hawkins’s model is real, but it is useful to explain what happens to traders as they work on their own psychological transformation. The more transformation they get, the more they move into power that will allow them to create and shape their own destiny and results. They become more awake.
Being “awake” also reminds me of the movie, The Matrix. When your consciousness rates 350 or below, you are locked into an illusion—the Matrix. The illusion is shaped by your beliefs but you don’t realize it. However, as you begin to realize it, you can adopt more and more useful beliefs that allow you to function in the matrix at a very high level. And that’s probably what happens at the first stages of transformation to traders. They become more and more able to control the outcome of their trading by doing such things as adopting “Tharp Think” beliefs.
Towards the end of the movie, Neo begins to realize that the Matrix itself is a total illusion. He had been programming himself to work more effectively merely within the illusions. That’s good for traders who understand the “Matrix” metaphor because they adopt useful beliefs and can function more effectively within the “Trading Matrix.” Neo comes to realize, however, that he can step out of the Matrix and function at a totally different level. Suddenly, he’s way beyond anything else in the Matrix. For traders, I refer to this as Trading in the Now. This probably begins to happen, speaking in terms of Hawkins’s model, when one begins to glimpse consciousness at the level of 600 or higher.
With that perspective in mind, I’ll tell you more about my expe
rience with the blessings. During my second blessing a couple of years back, I learned that people used to have to go to India for 42 days to become a blessing giver. Later, the process was reduced to a21-day training. I said “when can I go?” Well, I wasn’t able to go until July and by that time, becoming a blessing giver had been reduced to a 7-day course (for English speaking people) in Fiji. For more insight into the initial impact that this course had on me, see the two articles I wrote in August 2008: Understanding Your Core Issues Part 1 and Part 2. That course has had more impact on my life than anything else I’ve ever done, and it is still growing in significance. Those two articles only begin to scratch the surface of what has happened.
I now give blessings on the last day of most of my psychology workshops and the impact is quite profound. One of my Super Traders, a Vietnamese woman who lives in Toronto, went into a very profound state after one blessing more than a year ago. We talked about her experience and I said, “Why don’t you trade from that state?” She did and became one of the first Super Traders to trade in the now—with some amazing results. I’ve since heard many stories about the impact of the blessings on people lives after receiving blessings from me.
In late 2009, the seven-day blessing giver course evolved into a two-day course given by local Oneness Trainers. And then in March 2010, the founders, Amma-Bhagavan, announced that it was now time to start “waking up” the blessing givers. This meant that the blessing you received to become a blessing giver was a special Mukthi Deeksha blessing that started you on the awakening process.
In March of 2010, I sponsored a Oneness Course through the Van Tharp Institute right after our initial Peak 203 workshop that was open to the public. That course included the Mukthi Deeksha. Three staff members attended that course along with my two family members and about six of my Super Traders. In all I think about 18 people attended. And perhaps because it followed the Peak 101 and Peak 203 workshops, that two-day course was a mind blowing experience for everyone.
Because everything I’ve done in connection with Oneness has had a major and quick impact on my life, I went to India in September to attend the Oneness Trainer’s course (which, interestingly enough, one of my Super Traders has already attended). While it’s too recent to determine the full impact of that course on my life (I’m already seeing signs of it), I continue to believe that over the next year or so, it will be tremendous.
What does “waking up” mean according to Oneness? The first sign of permanent awakening is when things that used to give you charge (i.e., produce strong emotions or keep you thinking about it) only produce a charge that lasts 30 minutes or less. This doesn’t mean that you forget about it after 15 minutes but then see the person that produced the charge several days later and still have it. It means that all charge is permanently gone in 30 minutes or less. That’s the starting point.
As you continue to wake up, the charge period decreases until it is less than a minute. And finally the charge is totally gone. Nothing produces charge in you anymore. Nothing!
It is then that you begin to feel a sense of Oneness with other people. Perhaps it’s only fleeting, but it happens: first, oneness with one person, then another, and then with many people.
Next you start to feel one with the animals, the trees, and everything in nature. And finally, you experience total oneness. I’m not sure where Oneness with the Market comes in (i.e., trading in the now), but it’s probably around the same time that charge begins to disappear.
If you’d like to understand what it is like to live in that state, read Byron Katie’s book A Thousand Names for Joy. When I experienced Katie in person, it was very clear to me that she would rate very high on Hawkins’s consciousness scale. You can start to understand that when you read her book.
When I returned from the Oneness Training in early October, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to make Oneness part of the Van Tharp Institute curriculum. I had previously scheduled a two-day Oneness workshop for the Super Traders in December and I’d planned to present a Trading in the Now workshop after that. Now, I have decided that I will incorporate those two courses into a single four-day workshop and offer it to anyone who wants to learn the method. We’re going to call this workshop Peak 201: Trading in The Now, and we’ll offer it in the spring.
I have also decided to put on a two-day Oneness Awakening Course on November 13th and 14th after the Peak 203 workshop. There’s some question as to where that course will be held at the moment, but it will be either very affordable or free. If we wind up hosting the workshop at our facilities, anyone attending Peak 203 can attend the course for free. If we have to host the course somewhere else, you’ll pay an enrollment fee, but even that has been reduced from $225 down to $35. We really want people to attend.
