How is it that out of the infinite number of possibilities that are available to us, we have created the restricted reality in which we are living?
It is our thoughts that create our world. If you’re not sure about this, you might like to try this simple experiment. Close your eyes and think about your inadequacies, your defects, your imperfections and your failures. Now look in the mirror. Part two: close your eyes and feel your beauty, your inner worth, your Buddha nature…and look in the mirror. Do you look the same? What changed? Only your thoughts. And so it is with your whole life. You create what you think.
The relationship between thoughts and reality has many implications, which operate at different levels.
[Read: Mind-Body Connection – Can Mind Influence Your Body For Good Or Ill?]
Creating Things
Many courses and programs exist all over the world that teach participants how to use the power of their thoughts to create a particular reality. You can create a new car, a better job, a holiday, a new relationship – whatever you desire.
These methods work in areas of our lives where we have clarity of intention, which is something we don’t usually have. We are ambivalent, plagued with self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness. These are also thoughts and they interfere with our capacity to receive the reality that we would like to have.
Clearing The Unconscious
These beliefs, judgments and values live in our unconscious, where they exert their unseen control over our lives.
If you would like to try an experiment to see how this works, choose a habit or an addiction that you have – like smoking, or eating sugar, or asking your partner “Do you love me?” twelve times a day – and give it up for one month. Then watch your thoughts.
Instead of giving something up, an alternative experiment which will work just as well, is to choose to do something you would like to do and might have been postponing – like daily meditation, yoga, jogging, keeping your desk tidy – and do it every day for a month.
As you observe your thoughts in the month, you will be surprised at how many rationalizations, justifications, doubts, tricks and other paraphernalia you have been carrying around in your unconscious. These are the thoughts that are controlling your reality.
Western therapies offer many techniques to bring these hidden forces into the open and to change them. You can cathart them in emotional release, talk to them in various dialogue methods, uncover and reprogram them in hypnosis…
Generally in these methods, the intention is to be able to free the energy of the mind from its destructive or negative form, and to place the same energy in a more positive life-affirming frame. The energy that we use in self-condemnation can be used to affirm self-love. Simply put, you learn to change your thoughts.
Stepping Out Of The Trap Of The Mind
There is another possibility for all this thought-power: let the energy of the mind be without content. That is what meditation is about.
Instead of fighting with your thoughts or trying to change them, simply let them be, and withdraw your energy into your hara center, two inches below the navel. Focusing on the heart chakra, the energy center in the middle of the chest, is a very helpful intervening step for many people – the heart center is halfway between the head and the hara.
In this way, energy does not follow thought. Instead, it goes into…nothing!
It is from this place of nothingness, emptiness that we connect with all-that-is. The left and the right brain are in balance, and we experience a state of choicelessness, and fullness. This is the state of being where we are available to all the infinite possibilities of life, without the limitations of conditioned thoughts. From this state, life can create itself through us.
