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Cosmic Patterns & Personal Destinies: Are You Awake?

• Douglas James Cottrell PhD • Season 2 • Episode 7

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Dr. Douglas James Cottrell takes us on a profound exploration of the spiritual journey we all share, regardless of age or life stage. With over four decades of intuitive wisdom, he reveals how our lives follow predictable patterns—major spiritual lessons every decade and seven-year cycles of renewal that shape our development whether we're conscious of them or not.

The cornerstone of spiritual growth, Dr. Cottrell explains, is understanding that our consciousness records everything. Those moments when we've made mistakes, taken what isn't ours, or acted against our better judgment become permanently imprinted in what he calls our "soul DNA." This spiritual genetic code carries forward, creating the challenges and lessons we face. Far from random obstacles, these difficulties are specifically designed opportunities for our expansion that we've chosen at a higher level.

Detachment emerges as a crucial spiritual lesson throughout the conversation. As we move through life, our values naturally shift—the possessions that once seemed all-important eventually lose their significance. This evolution teaches us that people matter more than things, helping us avoid the suffering that comes from jealousy, anger, and disappointment. "Pleasure puts you to sleep, pain wakes you up, and when you struggle, you advance," Dr. Cottrell shares, offering a transformative perspective on life's difficulties.

Perhaps most powerfully, Dr. Cottrell distills success into four simple principles: know your destination, stay laser-focused, be tenacious, and never quit. While most people scatter their energy across multiple paths, those who achieve their dreams remain committed to one direction with unwavering determination. Every failure becomes not an endpoint but a stepping stone, each mistake bringing them closer when properly integrated. As he reminds us with timeless wisdom, "the only limitation of how much you're worth is in your mind."

Ready to transform your understanding of your spiritual journey? Subscribe to Wake Up with Dr. Douglas James Cottrell and discover how to navigate life's challenges with greater awareness, purpose, and peace of mind.

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Announcer:

Welcome to Wake Up with Dr Douglas James Cottrell, your source for helpful information, advice and tips to live your life in a mindful way in this increasingly chaotic world. For over four decades, Dr Douglas has been teaching people how to develop their intuition and live their lives in a conscious way. His news and views of the world tomorrow, today, are always informative and revealing. And now here's your host, Dr Douglas James Cottrell.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Good evening my friends. You know we're all on a spiritual path and we all have questions. We're attempting to find the right way, how to be a good person, and all those questions that come along in life. We have them all. Everybody goes through the steps in life, whether you're older, whether you're younger, whether you're in between, whether you're little, whether you're near the end. The paths in life are pretty much the same. Every 10 years we have a major spiritual lesson, and about every seven years we go through a seven, seven year cycle and we get to start all over again. And so as you begin to study the cycles of life and you start to look at the sacred numbers or numerology or -- everybody dabbles with a little astrology from now and then -- and you get into those serious books about spiritual development, you're trying to find out who you are, what kind of person you are, what's your pattern. So there's a certain curiosity that goes on as you stumble along the way of spirituality.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Of course there's the more formal, traditional spiritual development. We call it religion, which religion means our way of believing or our way of teaching to find a spiritual centering or path that we can get from here to there and become more spiritual, more enlightened, more moral, more just. But every religion has a bit of a different path or a different take on it and, if you think about it, the world's great religions came into the world at different times, sometimes thousands of years in difference in their appearance in the world. So what is the truth? Where are we going? What's happening? Well, the truth is you're here right now. At this moment, you're listening to my voice and you were listening to my voice a few minutes ago, and a few minutes from now it's going to be a different moment, but right now you have complete control and as you look forward and you come to this understanding that it's okay if you don't know, it's all right to ask . questions The the most important thing you can do is to continue to attempt to improve yourself and to look for those hidden mysteries which aren't so hidden, really. It's the simple truth attempting to find out, you know what's right? Is there justice? What do I do when somebody does a bad thing to me? How do I avoid temptation? And what happens when I can't avoid temptation and I take something that doesn't belong to me or I do something I ought not to have done?

Douglas James Cottrell:

Well, a spiritual person has a consciousness and you feel guilty about it. Maybe not right away, maybe later, maybe never, but sometime in your life, I put it to you, you will have a regret that you did something years ago. Because, you see, you never forget. That's in your mind, that's in your memory, that's in your soul's memory and it becomes part of your soul DNA. So the next time you come around, you have these little, you know, inadequacies, difficulties you might call them sins, karmas, problems, challenges, lessons. And the fact is that you continue to look towards attempting to understand yourself, projecting out into the world, looking for reference points in the world so that you know who you are and you can find out how you get along with things in the world. But you know it's always looking out and all the spiritual paths are turned around and looking in.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Spiritual masters will tell you: the only difference between you and me is that I know who I am and they'll point to their chest. They know that there's a soul inside and they're a bit more aware. They have the cosmic nudge. They're awake, sometimes fully awake, more than the average person. That's why they're a teacher, a master or whatever title you wish to give to them. The idea that you're on a path, that you're developing, you're improving, it's true, whether you believe it or not, whether you attempt to speed it up or to increase it, it doesn't matter, you're on the same path.

Douglas James Cottrell:

I know somebody would say: well, it's not fair, If you don't know that you're on a spiritual path and you don't know you're supposed to be improving, that's not fair. Well, that argument was put to me years ago and I thought about it. I said well, it's not true. You're on a path, you have a consciousness. You know when you do something bad to someone we all do. We know when we take something that doesn't belong to us, that we're not supposed to. The problem is, we think nobody's watching. You know what I mean? And you take something maybe you sneak a cookie, maybe you grab some money lying around on the table or maybe in one of your relatives' purses or something. Well, okay, you think you get away with it, but you don't. Your consciousness is aware and you regret that and you know. You feel guilty after, and maybe you want to make amends, and you go back and give the money back or you try to do something to, I guess, make up for that problem. You would apologize to people, and when you're sincerely apologizing to people, then the person you're apologizing -- get this -- they are supposed to forgive you. If they're a spiritual, believing person, they are required to forgive you, if your apology is sincere.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So as you go through life and you're making these mistakes and you're trying to find out what life's all about, look at yourself, where you are in life. You're a beginner in life, you're a teenager, you're an adult, you're older, and then you get old and older again. So where's the path? What are we supposed to do? Well, don't run away. Keep looking for improvements to yourself, but be patient. And I know. I once asked somebody what's my spiritual path and this teacher said to me: you will learn patience in your life. And I went: that's an easy one. And then I said, believe it or not: How long will it take? I actually said those words. And the answer was: you'll find out. Well, here I am a little further down the path and I'm still attempting to understand patience, because it's my life lesson.

Douglas James Cottrell:

We all have a major life lesson, but as we go along in life and we try to find out the things about life, we have different values and I guess that's the thing to, early on, find out that your values change over time. And as you change your values, you learn to realize that the things you have, the material things in life, all the important things you have at certain times in your life, aren't important later on in life. For instance, you remember when you got a tricycle or some little vehicle, you were with a little scooter or something when you were a child? I'll bet you can't even tell me what color it was or what you did with it, but you may remember you had one. Well, as you got older, you went to a bicycle and then, later still, you went to perhaps a motorcycle or a car and then later on you went to something else a bigger car, a bigger pickup truck, a camper. You know, oh my gosh.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And as you can see, your progression in life is that your values change. You don't particularly care so much about that tricycle or bicycle, but at the time in your life it was all important to you. And so as you get through life now and you become a little more aware of who you are, and then you find out, and then you find out, as you become more aware, that there's a lot more to know about yourself, you can start to see that your values in the past, which have changed, which have faded, still bring you memories. When you look at that fishing rod up in the top of the garage, you remember when you went fishing when you were a teenager how you caught a big fish. But that memory is in your mind. It's in your mind forever, by the way. It's in your DNA. That is a memory of a past time. But the value now is well, the fishing rod's all rusted and it's going to be probably given away or thrown away. It's not as important to you now.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So all of your material wealth, all the way through your life, comes into your hands. It stays for a while and then it passes and leaves you. Everything, everything. As you get older, and you start to think about, you know, secession and inheritances and things like that, you start to think: everybody's going to have all of my stuff and it's all just going to, like a bomb off, i t's going to disperse and you wonder, gee whiz, I wonder what they're going to do with my stuff, that favorite thing here, that favorite thing there. Let's hope that they cherish it because it's part of you. But the idea is that you're leaving all this behind and you're moving onward and upward into the spiritual realms.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Now, when you're young, I don't expect you to find that important and certainly it's like, yeah, you might have questions about life after death. You might have fears about dying. You certainly don't want to die in a terrible way, through sickness or whatever. And so you have these questions when you're younger. But as you get older they're still there. Until that moment of passing you still wonder is there really something else? But all the way through your life, as you explore life in general, letting things come into your life and realizing they'll be there for a while and then they'll pass away or they will pass to someone else, it sort of puts the stage set that you learn detachment and those things of value are important to you for a time being. But detachment all the way through your life is a lesson to be learned, and then you can give things away. Or when somebody, let's say, borrows something without permission or somebody breaks something of yours, well, it's an item, it's not that important. A person is important. Everything else can be replaced. And so you start to learn detachment. If you learn that lesson early, that those things around you aren't important and what does that do? It leads you to inner wisdom. You perhaps don't become jealous. You perhaps learn not to be angry or to throw a tantrum or to believe that you've lost something forever and that's the way it's going to be for the rest of your life. That you felt disappointment or rejection and that's the way it's going to be for the rest of your life. I can assure you it is not, unless you give up.

Douglas James Cottrell:

If you're little, you're curious. You go into a room and there's a bunch of other children there. If you ever watch children, they go over and start talking to each other. They play with each other, they get along and then they go home, never to see each other again. But for that time they were together, they were having wonderful times communicating back and forth.

Douglas James Cottrell:

As you get older, you learn to be cautious. You sort of play the political game you know. Like are you important or who's the one in the room that's most important? Who should I listen to? Who do I have to please? Do I have to watch my manners? You know, you start to become critical of yourself and aware of your situation in the wrong context. That awareness is around you, your environment, and that awareness should be something that indeed you are paying attention to. So you know where you are, so you're balanced and so you're not going to get in trouble. You're not going to let your guard down. You're not going to trust everybody and certainly, when you're in situations that are of concern, you're going to leave or you're going to do something to take yourself out of that jeopardy. That all is a learned trait, that awareness. This is good. To be skeptical is good. To be cynical? Well, I don't think so. But never view the future from the past. Things go wrong in the past, but they're teachers, they're lessons, and that gives you the strength, the wisdom, the awareness that in the future, be a little cautious to think things through.

Douglas James Cottrell:

That's called wisdom. Because you've had experiences, you understand something intellectually, and you put it together. You have wisdom. No other way. You can't read a book and have wisdom. You can have knowledge, but until you try it out, hands-on experience, you don't really have full wisdom. So you go through life and you make mistakes, you go like: okay, I'm not going to do that again. You're wiser because you had the mistake. You're not wiser because somebody warned you about it or you read about it in a book or who knows what, you saw a poster. You're wiser because you had some input and some experience and now you know. Okay, but you don't know everything, you only know in part. And if you can understand you only know in part and that your life moves forward in steps or octaves, or procedures, if you will, of advancement and awareness and wisdom and intellect, then you begin to know who you are. You find out what's going on inside.

Douglas James Cottrell:

You know there's 12 basic patterns. If you look at astrology or any particular thing like that, you'll see there's 12. There's 12 disciples, there's 12 groups. 12 is a very magical number. but in astrology, let's use that as a basic example, there are 12 astrological signs. And each one of those signs has a bit of every other sign in it. So Capricorn has a bit of Aquarius in it. Okay, and as you look at these signs, that are the main pattern, plus these additional aspects of the sign, you can see that if you take 12, and each of those 12 has 12 additional inputs, that's 144 patterns.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And so, in the world, the soul wants to come into the world and pick where it's going to be and what it's going to learn and what lessons it's going to enjoy. Well, it only has to pick one of 144 to find out what that's all about. Okay. I don't know everything. I'm giving you something to think about. We're talking about how a soul finds its way in life and how it picks the body, how it picks the parents, how it picks the time in the world and how it picks the life path. So, as we go beyond our own self, we begin to think: well, you know, is there anybody else like me? Absolutely there is. They might not look like you, but they have the same experience as you at the same time, because the cosmos time clock is ticking the same for all these 144 patterns.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And when you meet somebody and they say, you know, I'm selling my car, and you say, well, coincidentally, I'm selling mine. And they say, next week I have to go on a trip, you say, well, coincidentally, I'm going on a trip. And then you start to talk to this person, you find that you have a lot in common. And then you find out the same things are happening to them at or near or approximately the same time that they're happening you, as you look back A nd if you keep in touch with this person, they say, hey, I'm selling my house, I'm going to be moving. They say, well, coincidentally, I'm selling my house or thinking about it. And so you see that the life, the pattern, is predictable.

Douglas James Cottrell:

I know you're going to say: but I didn't pick this body, I didn't ask to be born, it's all my parents' fault. They have to take care of me. No, no, no, no, no. Your parents provided the vehicle. You chose to come into the world through that vehicle, that body, the little baby. You chose it and therefore the economic situation of the parents rubs off on you. The environment you live in, in well, that's the one that you ,. as As a spiritual ., You you wanted to live in an environment and all of a sudden, all the things that are around you, you you chose, even the ones you don't like. Remember this: this pleasure Pleasure puts you to sleep, pain wakes you up and when you struggle, you advance. If you don't struggle,. you You just kind of like let coast along, you rust and you degrade.

Douglas James Cottrell:

My great-grandfather said if you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards, and if you think about that, it makes sense. But the illusion is that you're not. The illusion is you have lots of time. The reality is you do not have a lot of time. Every day goes by quickly and as you get older, you know what? Something is wrong with the time clock, because the days seem shorter and the years go by faster and faster and faster. So I'm not going to explain that phenomena as a phenomena, it's a matter of how you perceive things. It's the same 24 hours we all have every day. What do we do with that 24 hours? Do we sleep 20 hours or do we sleep two hours? Do we do things that tire us out or do we do things to make us healthy? You see, you have the choice. You can choose to do something or you can choose not to do something. There's the sin of omission and the sin of commission, but it's a choice. Everything is a choice.

Douglas James Cottrell:

You know, if you want to be rich, absolutely rich, all you have to know is yes or no. What, that's it? Absolutely. You have a thousand dollars. You put it in a stock market account and you say, yes, I'm going to buy. And now you say I'm selling. Buy, sell. Yes, no. Easy as that. You just have to be right all the time. And there is the problem. That's life. We're not right all the time. But if you think about it, if you study how to say yes or no, buy or sell, and you're in a place where money is made by buying and selling, whether it's a marketplace, a grand bazaar or in some place where you're dealing with stocks of companies, commodities, for instance, as well. You can, by learning how easy it is to buy and sell. You know you buy low and you sell high. You make money. Sometimes people buy high and sell low and they lose money. But that again is another question on how to perceive what's correct, to say yes or no.

Douglas James Cottrell:

But I'm trying to convey to you how simple it can be to make money. Of course, having an idea, being an entrepreneur and going into business. You're going to say to me but I'm not a businessman, I'm a working person. I just like to go to work every day. But I'll tell you, you are in business for yourself: you have income, you have expenses and you have outgo. You have to pay for those expenses. So, in a way, you're in business, you're trying to make a living. Well, you can do it and endure in what would be hours per week, or you might go into a side business and have a part-time business where you're selling something. You have an idea that develops into a bigger, better way of making money and all of a sudden you're rich or you have money coming in, put it that way. So what about hanging on to it? Okay, there are people who are super savers and they become rich. There are people who are super money makers and they become rich. And the ones that are super rich are the ones that make a lot of money and can keep or save a lot of money. Those are the three patterns I've found.

Douglas James Cottrell:

But when you were little, did somebody tell you about how to be rich, how to be prosperous, how you handle your money, how to handle your resources, how to handle your health? Not really, it's kind of trial by error. You're lucky if people take you under the wing and guide you. You're lucky if you're aware. You're lucky if you have a goal set and you want to achieve it. Of all the people we've had on this show who have been motivational speakers or they've been successful in their own life, they come down to simply this: Know where you want to go, and you can only go in one direction. Be laser focused, don't let people take you and divert your energies. And be tenacious and never quit. That's it, the four steps.

Douglas James Cottrell:

As you come to believe in yourself, as you come to work with your dreams or you meditate on something, you will be able to find that future destination that you want to be in your life at some time, and then all your life should be focused on acquiring that. But, my friends, we don't usually pick a destination. We kind of stumble along or we do three or four different things. All successful people do one thing over and over and over again. They are tenacious, they don't quit, they keep going. Now, when they have a problem or a fault or when they fail, they stumble, they pick themselves up and they keep going. There's no way in the world you can expect to know where it is where you're going to be in the future. You have an intention, an idea, how to get there and then, as you go along, you have to kind of thread the needle by overcoming the mistakes, going around the blocks, dealing with disappointments, attempting to find your way. But every time you make a mistake and you correct or gain from it, you're one step closer to being successful. But it comes in here, it comes from within. That awareness is: whatever is in your mind is what you're going to find yourself doing or going towards in life. What I mean by that is: the only limitation of how much you're worth is in your mind. Are you underselling yourself? More than likely. Do you believe in yourself? Well, do you have to ask people, get permission, or what do they think about your ideas? Then you don't really believe.

Douglas James Cottrell:

If you can be simply, I guess, aware of yourself that your ideas are good for you, other people will throw you the curve. They'll tell you don't do that. And then later on you find, I should have, I could have made a fortune. You go and say but you told me not to. And they say well, why did you listen to me, you stupid person? I didn't tell you, it's your problem. And then you go whoa, disappointment in people again.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So where am I going? What's going to happen? Well, enjoy the adventure. Never stop. . Always find alternatives to everything that comes in front of ., No no matter what it is, is there is an alternative. If you have a difficulty, there's an alternative to get around it. If you have a problem, there's an alternative. You might not know the answer, but you can find it. You can seek it out, you can ask people. You just have to say: say there's got to be a solution, there's got to be an answer here, and then don't give up.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Most people give up in their life. At the end of their lifetime, after working 40 years, y ou can ask any economist, 3% of the people are self-sufficient, they have their own money, they're out of debt and they're living a comfortable life. The other 97% are depending upon a check from their pension, from their social security, from something else. Usually their house. At the end of their life, they have to sell their house to go and live in a nursing home. Oh my gosh. I know you're 25 years old, so that's never going to happen to me. Yes, it is. The point being is make your own mistakes, learn from it and keep going. Until

Douglas James Cottrell:

next time. God bless you, my friends.

Announcer:

Thank you very much for listening to Wake Up. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you'll be notified when a new episode is posted, and we'd greatly appreciate your review of our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts to let others know about the great content we're producing. For more about Dr Douglas' self-development classes, books and other related products, please visit his website douglasjamescartrellcom. Until next time, we wish you all of God's blessings health, wealth and peace of mind.