Wherever you are in your path, this is the most important concept you need to understand before you can move forward: Your Thoughts (conscious and unconscious) affect Your Reality. This is what books/movies such as “The Secret” and “What the Bleep do We Know” and “You Can Heal Your Life” suggest. This is what the following steps are all about, the reason they can work at all. But this is also a radical theory to many people, and so I will attempt first to illustrate the truth of it.
We all know that our state of mind affects how we perceive the world. When you feel grumpy everything seems to goes wrong--your world appears to treat you grumpily. When you’re confident everything seems to be easy for you. When you’re happy the whole world seems to smile back at you. But what if we reassessed cause and affect? What if the world treated you badly (grumpily) because you expected it to do so? What if things went your way because you expected them (confidently) to do so? What if the smiling world wasn’t smiling at you, but reflecting your own happy thoughts and feelings back to you? Wouldn’t you come to the conclusion that your thoughts--the way you see the world--affect how the world seems to become manifest in your experience? Wouldn’t you come to the conclusion that your thoughts affect everything?
Imagine walking across Central Park in Manhattan on a hot summer night. It’s four in the morning. You need to pass through a tunnel. A bunch of thugs are loitering near the entrance, smoking and laughing and watching you approach. You’re afraid. You think they’re drug addicts. You think they might mug you. You walk past without looking at them, holding your bag or purse or books close to your body, hoping they won’t notice you. Hoping they won’t bother you.
What happens?
Of course; you get mugged. You’re a perfect target. You’re scared and everything about you projects fear. Everything--even your thoughts--project you as a victim.
Now imagine the scene again. It’s a warm summer night. You hear distant traffic, crickets, frogs, and cicadas. The night air is warm. You walk through Central Park in Manhattan and you’re completely tuned into your surroundings. You’re in love with the stars in the sky, the smell of the grass, the whispering of the wind in the trees. You come to a tunnel and notice the intricately carved trefoil arch, the wonderful brownstone exterior bordering a sixty-six foot brick interior; it looks mysterious but inviting. You wonder how the acoustics will be inside. You look with interest to the group of young men at the mouth of the tunnel. They look at you, curious to see who would brave the most notoriously dangerous park in the world in the very dead of night. And you smile and nod to them as you walk past. “Beautiful evening,” you say, eyes bright, back straight, and you mean it.
What happens?
Sure, they might still mug you. But have the odds changed? Is there a greater possibility they will think twice? Of course there is. Perhaps they would be taken aback by your confident demeanor. Or maybe they’d think you were a crazy vigilante and not worth the struggle. The point is, the only thing that would have changed was your perception of the situation, yourself, and by extension, the world. But your thoughts would have affected your reality.
Step two of the following process comes from French Philosopher Pierre Tielhard de Chardin; it is the recognition that you are not a body having a spiritual experience, you are a spirit having a physical experience. This is key to controlling your thoughts in situations which seem to be negative. If you recognize that nothing which happens to your body ever really touches that which you truly are, there can never be any cause for fear no matter what your situation.
Sure. It’s seems impossible that all this is just an illusion as the spikes are driven through your hands. But that is exactly what the crucifixion was meant to reveal...If you can bring yourself to understand the truth about the power of thought, then you will be able to put it into practice, no matter what seems to be happening around you. And understanding the truth about your soul is still not the same as knowing. So, in order to know we attempt to retrain our subconscious beliefs. This is why it may take so long for some people to achieve results. They expect their outer world to change before they change their inner landscape, and it can’t happen that way. So we repeat certain affirmations or mantras which may seem from the outside to be simple polyanna-ish positive thinking, but in truth, we are un-doing the brainwashing of our ego’s and re-training our minds to know ourselves to be unlimited, omnipotent, and omnipresent: God, in other words.
Personal preference is another example of how our thoughts create our reality. One person hates a particular piece of music (or painting, or type of food, or smell) while another person loves it. The music (or painting, or type of food, or smell) hasn’t changed. It’s the perception--the thought--of the respective people toward the static object that is different. So what then is the truth about the object? What then is real?
On the highest level there is only one truth; everything is an expression of one thought; everything is fundamentally connected on the level of Source. On the highest level of being there is no duality, no good or bad, everything simply IS. But here, while writing and reading this, we are not at the highest level--or more accurately, we are not aware that we are at that highest level--yet. We seem to be here in this world and our thoughts seem to give meaning to everything we perceive. Therefore, when a tree falls in a forest it doesn’t make a sound unless someone is there to hear it. In this way we all make our own truth. So I say choose not to be a victim. Choose to understand that your thoughts today reflect your reality tomorrow. Choose to understand that cause and effect are backwards in our accepted paradigm of reality.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
What came first was actually the idea of both.
