Today’s tip is excerpted from my book The Inside-Out Revolution – you can read more here.
| ‘Remember – and this is very important – you’re only one thought away from happiness, you’re only one thought away from sadness. The secret lies in Thought. It’s the missing link that everybody in this world is looking for… It’s a gift that we were given to have the freedom to walk through life and see what we want to see. How much better than that can you get? That you have the freedom to walk through life and see as a free thinker, that is the greatest gift ever, to be a free thinker.’ – Syd Banks |
When I first heard practitioners of the Three Principles talk about the principle of Thought in semi-rapturous tones, I thought that at best they were a bit simple and at worst a bit brainwashed. After all, I already knew that people thought. It hardly seemed worth mentioning, let alone waxing rhapsodic about.
But then one of my mentors pointed out the nature of what he called ‘ordinary miracles’ – those things that on the one hand are truly extraordinary and on the other happen so consistently that we take them completely for granted. Things like the sun appearing in the sky and not only lighting our days but also warming and nourishing life on our planet. Or gravity keeping us fixed to the Earth when every other law of physics would have us hurtling out into space.
Thought is all around us, which in some ways makes it largely invisible to us. Without thought, there would be no delineation in our world – no perception, no distinction, and no variety of experience. It’s both creator and substance of our beliefs and values; it’s the raw material of our hopes and dreams.
While most of us are aware of Thought at the level of what we think about life, we tend to be unaware of how much of life itself is created and maintained by Thought. Much of what appears to be solid and real is actually part of the illusion of our personal thinking.
To better understand this idea, consider an iceberg. Icebergs appear solid, but they’re actually made up of the water that surrounds them. In the world of form, this means that a tiny degree of fluctuation in temperature can completely eliminate icebergs that have been in place for hundreds of years and create new ones seemingly out of nowhere. In the inner world of the formless, it means that no matter how solid the foundations of your reality may seem, it only takes a slight shift in consciousness for your entire world to change.
To me, this is one of the most exciting things about Thought. It’s at the heart of everything we experience, from monsters to angels and from problems to possibilities. And since we have an infinite potential for new thought, we’re only ever one new thought away from a completely different experience of being alive.
With all my love,
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