Book Description

If you want to change your life, you have to change your thoughts! Dr. Donald Curtis—a minister and teacher for over two decades—offers this exciting book on the power of positive thinking, describing the numerous rewards you can easily gain just by letting your thoughts work for you! Dr. Curtis proves again that we are what we think—physically, mentally, and spiritually. Through a series of thought provoking, often humorous anecdotes, the author shares personal experiences about how he changed his own life.

In addition, this spiritual book contains the wise thoughts of some of our most beloved minds, such as Ram Das, Emerson, Shakespeare, and Mother Teresa. Its inspirational message will touch your heart and change your life.

Foreword

The title of Dr. Donald Curtis' new book, Helping Heaven Happen, is so catchy and inviting that it makes you smile when you say it aloud. But the message of the book, though simply stated, is complex, profound, and deeply challenging.

In this sensitive, mind-stretching book, Dr. Curtis in a fresh and arresting way, shows you how—with divine help—you can retool your mind and heart, expand your conscious­ness, and remake your personal world by affirmative thought.

Here is a very practical text that offers concrete and spe­cific guidelines for building a personal program of spiritual development for anyone attempting to achieve such a goal. Dr. Curtis personally leads you through a series of beautiful prayers of affirmation, meditation, and consciousness expan­sion entitled, "Personal Realization," at the end of each of the book's twelve chapters. This is an important feature for those in search of direct and immediate guidance and help. As you read these self-help prayers a number of times, meditating on them deeply and letting them really sink in, giving them the time to infuse your inner heart and mind to the very core of your God-centered spirit, you will actually—miraculously—experience that self-realization he promises.

This renowned spiritual teacher writes with the sureness of one who knows from experience that what he advocates will work because he, himself, has experienced it working in his own life and has witnessed it in the lives of many others who have turned to him for help.

This how-to-do-it spiritual guidebook, Helping Heaven Happen is, in part, also a revealing and moving memoir. This is one of the book's greatest charms. Donald Curtis' life expe­riences as a western farm boy, as an aspiring author, college speech instructor, university theater director, network radio performer, Broadway stage actor, and rising young movie star all serve as colorful parables to illustrate his illuminating teachings.

It was during these risk-filled, precarious years that he slowly learned the hard way that "your strength is only in your use of God's strength." Not in a blinding flash, but very gradually, he came to understand the ultimate truth that, when you really surrender your personal self totally to God's guidance and help through prayer, through meditation, and through concentrated thought in your daily living, your self becomes quite a different being from the ego it previously was—and all sorts of beautiful things begin to happen to you—and all kinds of glorious solutions result!

It was after this awakening of his own inner God-centered spirit, inspired by such notable spiritual teachers as Dr. Ernest Holmes and Dr. Manly Palmer Hall, that he was impelled to become a teacher and a minister of the gospel of love, as exemplified in the New Age teachings of the Church of Religious Science and the Unity School of Christianity.

Dr. Curtis served for many years as Senior Minister of the Unity Church of Dallas, and has often been a guest speaker for many other congregations and groups throughout the world. He is heard and seen regularly on radio and televi­sion with his message of abundant living. His work also in­cludes service to humanity and global dedication to the service of God.

Dr. Curtis' insightful personal recollections greatly en­rich his inspiring book. He unsparingly notes his own very human errors, during his earlier aspiring years, with a dis­arming frankness and a rare humility that is warmly appeal­ing. Somehow he makes you feel that if he, despite his errors, managed to find the purpose and fulfillment of the life that God has now granted him, surely you can do likewise!

Dr. Curtis, however, is not writing an autobiography and, indeed, these personal stories—though fascinating—constitute only a small portion of his text. As he explains quite simply and modestly, "I have set forth my personal ex­periences merely as a metaphor for larger and more impor­tant concepts to show how these principles work. In the final analysis, what happens to any one of us is only important insofar as it contributes to all of us. The exchange of our indi­vidual experiences may well be the means by which we learn from each other, and move together to make a better world."

This is a wide-ranging, broad-gauged book directed to­ward people of all faiths who believe in the power of love and the divinity of life as well as its divine diversity.

Having known Dr. Curtis as a warm and wonderful friend for many years, I can assure you that he has no illusions about walking above water except when the deck of a sound ship is beneath his feet. The God-driven, God-inspired author of this impressive book would be the first to admit that he is just another vulnerable human being like the rest of us foot-dragging mortals. But I have also witnessed his growth into one of God's most selfless "tillers of the vineyard" and have seen him become—truly—one of God's great gentlemen. I'm proud to record that, by the practice of what he preaches, he is a living example of the self-development through divine surrender and cosmic consciousness that he dares us to emu­late.

David Hyatt, Ph.D.

San Francisco, California

Preface

During the years since the publication of my first book, Your Thoughts Can Change Your Life, a whole generation of people have changed their lives by applying the simple mental and spiritual techniques in that book and in the more than twenty others I have written following it.

This current volume will provide an update of what I know about this subject, and at least a partial record of how my thoughts have changed my own life, as well as reports of others who have made the same discovery. In Your Thoughts Can Change Your Life and my other books, I have set forth many techniques to help us change our lives by changing our thoughts. Life is a "do-it-yourself" proposition. There is nothing we cannot do, nothing we cannot be, no problem we cannot solve, no challenge we cannot meet if we take charge of our own thought processes.

As you build your own consciousness with affirmative thoughts, balanced emotions, and high spiritual awareness, you will be the person you want to be, and you will live the life you want to live.

This book is about you. It tells you everything you al­ways wanted to know about yourself and may have been afraid to ask, or to do anything about.

Here is something to help you meet that situation—so, read on!

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