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Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force—that thoughts rule the world.103
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am including a chapter on “thought” because there is nothing in our lives that will influence us more, whether we realize it or not. All the great philosophers, spiritual teachers, and sages throughout the ages have recognized the impact thoughts can have on our lives and our well-being. No one can give an exact count on the number of thoughts we have each and every day, but it is estimated at thirty to sixty thousand. If you think about it (another thought), if we had one thought every three seconds, that would equal thirty thousand thoughts in a day, and that is probably a conservative number.
Thought is the key to all treasures. 104
—Honoré de Balzac
So a better question would be: why not thought? Thoughts not only rule our world but also take us on wild, mental, and emotional rides. If you can harness the power of your thoughts, however, you can use them to your advantage. We don’t have to get caught up in the mental drama that dominates our minds each and every day.
Most of us go through our entire lives without giving a whole lot of thought to thoughts. In school, we are taught math, science, biology, history, and English; we learn to memorize and solve problems, but at least in my case, not one teacher mentioned anything about our thoughts. My parents didn’t discuss thoughts. My grandparents didn’t. My doctors didn’t. No one talked to me about thoughts. You accepted them for what they were, lived in a world of your five senses, and that’s just the way life was.
Yet you and your thoughts go everywhere together. They are your best friend and your worst enemy. You are never without them. They can drive you insane, and they can take you to heights you’ve never experienced. They also have the power to imprison you for a lifetime. Nothing else in your life will have as much power and influence on you as your thoughts. Nothing will affect you more. Nothing is more important. Thoughts control every aspect of your life if you let them. And yet, they are rarely mentioned in schools, homes, churches, the doctor’s office, or anywhere we look for enlightenment.
Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. 105
—Buddha
Taro Gold, in his book Living Wabi Sabi, says this about your thoughts: “Nothing has caused you more trouble than your own psychology. Nothing has hurt you as much as your own thinking. Nothing is so frightening as the ideas that someone could read your mind! Pay attention to your thinking and you will see that 90 percent of your thoughts are fears, judgments, and worries. If you were to let these thoughts out onto the street, most of them would be arrested by lunchtime!”106
If you can master your thoughts, you can master your life. Behind thought lies the power of all creation. And this creation is not limited to new ideas and inventions. It extends to the creation of your life—how you view it, how you react to it, how you live it, and how your body and your mind respond to the nonstop bombardment of thoughts. If you let them, thoughts will rule your life and your world.
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confine of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.107
—Eckhart Tolle
Thirty thousand thoughts a day can take you to many different places: happy, sad, overjoyed, depressed, lonely, scared, euphoric, worried, judgmental, enlightened… you can pretty much run the gamut on the wide variety of emotions and feelings that thoughts bring to your life each day. You may even experience all of the above feelings in one day! It’s hard to believe you can go from depressed to euphoric to worried to overjoyed all in twenty-four hours, but it can and does happen.
And now for the bad news. Most of the thoughts you have are the same ones you had yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Many of these are recurring thoughts that you have each and every day. Not only the same thoughts, but the same negative thoughts—the same fears, worries, and judgments—repeated day after day.
Since most of us have our daily routines, we are more likely to have the same kinds of thoughts each day, and it’s very easy to focus on the negative ones. Maybe it’s your dread of going to work, dealing with a coworker you have issues with, fighting the traffic to and from work (annoyed by all the bad drivers, even though you’re never one of them), worrying about your children and their grades and getting them into college, fretting over bills you have to pay, strategizing things that need fixing in your home or apartment. You can dwell on and be consumed by all of these thoughts.
You could have a thought about one specific bill that you haven’t paid, and just from thinking about this one isolated bill, your thoughts could go from where you will get the money to pay this bill to not having enough money to send your children to college. One minute you’re thinking about a past-due cable bill, and the next minute your child may not go to college! And then worry and depression could set in.
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. 108
—Buddha
In this case, the thoughts were financial, but they could be personal as well. Maybe it’s something you don’t like about yourself. Maybe you think you are too fat, too thin, too short, your nose is too big—and as you focus your attention on these thoughts, you help them grow, just like a seed. You are watering and fertilizing your negative thoughts. You are giving them power. And thanks to this power, they not only grow but come to control your life. The more you think about them, the more they will grow. But they are only as powerful as the attention you give them.
So we live in our own little thought world, engulfed in the same thoughts that we have every day (over and over) and even more engulfed by the negative ones. And the really bad news? You haven’t given it a second thought!
The one who learns how to control his thinking, learns how to control his destiny. We are bound by our own thought world. Nothing can save us but ourselves. The individual who will learn how consciously to change his thinking processes can remold his destiny. 109
—Ernest Holmes
In our lifetime, we could potentially have over a billion thoughts. Over a billion thoughts, and yet they are never discussed in school unless you happen to take some psychology or philosophy courses. We go through most of our lives with very little knowledge that we do have power over our thoughts. As Sakyong Mipham writes in his book Ruling Your World: “We let thoughts drag us around by a ring in our nose as if we were cows in an Indian market place. This is how we lose control of our lives. We live life in an anxious, haphazard state.”110
In his book The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer describes such a state:
“Did you turn off the lights downstairs? You better go check. Not now, I’ll do it later. I want to finish watching the show. No, do it now. That’s why the electric bill is so high.”
You sit in silent awe, watching all of this. Then, a few seconds later, your couch-mate is engaged in another dispute:
“Hey, I want to get something to eat! I’m craving some pizza. No, you can’t have pizza now; it’s too far to drive. But I’m hungry. When will I get to eat?”
To your amazement, these neurotic bursts of conflicting dialogue just keep going on and on… The bottom line is undeniable: If somehow that voice managed to manifest in a body outside of you, and you had to take it with you everywhere you went, you wouldn’t last a day. If somebody were to ask you what your new friend is like, you’d say, “This is one seriously disturbed person. Just look up neurosis in the dictionary and you’ll get the picture.”111
Wherever the thoughts want to take us, we oblige and go along for the ride. And what a ride it can be! One minute you’re on a roll with life, having nothing but good thoughts, and then you get a call from a creditor, someone cuts you off in traffic, you start worrying about saving money for retirement, you play over and over something somebody said to you or perhaps that you said to them, and pretty soon those good times you were experiencing a few minutes earlier are a distant memory. In a matter of minutes, you have gone from an emotional high to an emotional low, all because you let your thoughts drag you wherever they wanted to.
Mastery of self-control of your thoughts and feelings is your highest achievement. 112
—Neville Goddard
Thoughts can affect every aspect of your life, including your health. I remember hearing Deepak Chopra recount that when patients were told they had cancer, they could age twenty years right in front of his eyes. A few seconds earlier they were fine. It’s amazing, the power of just a few words spoken (nothing more than vibrations in the air). They can affect your entire physiology.
Think about a time when you were given bad news—maybe you lost a loved one, your boss fired you, your spouse announced an intention to leave you, someone told you that you were fat, ugly, stupid, any kind of negative news or negative remark—and think about how you felt. At the moment, even though you may not have realized it, you probably aged ten or twenty years. Not that it lasted, but in that moment, if someone had taken a picture of you, you probably wouldn’t recognize the person in the picture.
That’s the impact thoughts can have on you. And obviously, when thoughts get completely out of control, that’s when people seek professional help. If you continue to be absorbed by negative thoughts, it can be the source of all kinds of disease. Negative thoughts can affect virtually every cell in your body, and not in a good way.
One of the hardest lessons we have to learn is that we build our bodies by our thoughts; that they are discordant or harmonious, diseased or healthy, in accordance with our habitual thoughts and the thought of those who preceded us.
There are those who, having learned this lesson, have had their countenance so altered in a single year by persistent right thinking, that one would scarcely recognize them. They have changed faces that were lined with doubt, disfigured with fear and anxiety, and scarred by worry or vice, to reflectors of hope, cheer, and joy.
Saint Paul showed scientific knowledge when he said: Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. That is, the changing, ennobling, purifying, refreshing of our thoughts. Growth everywhere neutralizes decay, renewing the mind. There is a law of perpetual renewal, a recreation constantly going on in us which is only interfered with by our adverse thought and discordant mental attitude. 113
—Orison Swett Marden
If you only study one thing out of this entire book on a daily basis, I would probably recommend the passage above by Orison Swett Marden. That’s the good news about thoughts. If we know that we have power over our thoughts and fully realize and utilize this power to our advantage, we can literally renew ourselves each and every day. We can stop the decay. We can grow. We can recreate ourselves now. Life is all about renewal—perpetual renewal. We are on a never-ending quest for renewal. It doesn’t matter what age you are, because after all, that too is just a thought.
The uncontrolled, ungoverned use of thought and feeling has brought about all kinds of discord, sickness, and distress. Few, however, believe this, and keep going on and on continually creating by their ungoverned thought and desire, chaos in their worlds. 114
—Saint Germain
I am in no way implying you can stop thoughts from entering into your mind—good, bad, or indifferent. You have no power or control over what comes into your thought world. But you do have power over how thoughts affect you, over how you react to them. Let the discordant and adverse thoughts pass with no effect. Give them no power.
Life can be difficult enough at times without you piling on and latching on to negative thoughts. Talk about your own worst enemy! Embrace the good thoughts. Think constructively. Tell yourself how magnificent you are, that every aspect of your being is renewing itself. Growth is only achieved by these types of thoughts. Stop the decay. Why not try it? Do you have anything to lose, except maybe ill health, depression, unhappiness? If you can do this and practice this every day, you will be renewed.
We build our future thought by thought, For good or ill, yet know it not. 115
—Henry Van Dyke
I don’t have any magic pills that will eliminate certain thoughts from entering into your brain—no one does—but I will tell you that you have an even more powerful weapon. You have the ultimate power in how you react to them. Thoughts are meaningless, passing in and out of your brain every few seconds, tempting you to latch on for a wild ride wherever they might be going (and usually no place good), but you don’t have to latch on. They don’t mean anything unless you give them meaning.
You have the power and ability to watch thoughts come into your mind, recognize them as just thoughts and nothing more, and let them depart with no side effects. No damage done. Rise above them and give them no credence. Be the watcher of your thoughts. Laugh at the ones that used to upset you. But grab on tightly to the good ones!
The mind is the master over every kind of fortune: itself acts in both ways, being the cause of its own happiness and misery. 116
—Seneca
This ability to choose how you react to your thoughts is one of the most freeing and powerful tools you have in your life, and you need to use it. You need to embrace this power. Make it part of your daily ritual. Don’t do it occasionally—do it every moment. It’s not discussed in school because it’s not part of the core curriculum and may be considered too mystical, too metaphysical, with not enough science behind it. So we let these thirty thousand thoughts drag us around because that’s the way life is. We don’t know any different. We are ignorant about thoughts. As Henry David Thoreau said, “With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a torrent.”117 It’s a topic that should be discussed in every chapter of this book as a reminder of how important it is to your life, your health, your wealth, your happiness, and your well-being.
It is strange that we so long failed to understand the wonderful power of thought, for it is taught by every religion and philosophy in the history of the world. Thought is the only reality; conditions are but the outward manifestation of thoughts; as thought changes, all conditions must change in order to be in harmony with their creator, which is thought. 118
—Venice Bloodworth
If you have the power to affect every cell in your body by the way you think and the thoughts you give credence to, why would you choose anything but the highest, the best, the grandest, the noblest thoughts possible? If negative thoughts can impact cells in a negative manner, the positive ones will do just the opposite. Forget the negative ones. Let them come and go like leaves blowing in the wind. The greatest, most magnificent power we all have is that we can think whatever we want. Right now, you can think whatever you want! No one can take that away from you. No one can come inside your mind and tell you to stop thinking that way.
It is the grandest freedom of all. It’s our ultimate power. And although most of us were not exposed to this growing up and even as adults, it’s not too late to learn. Starting now, you can change yourself, renew yourself, and empower yourself. You can begin now to change your life by the way you think and the way you react to thoughts. Why not? What have you got to lose? Where has latching onto negative thoughts taken you except on a downward spiral?
Decree now, and say it meaningly: “From this moment forward, I will admit to my mind for mental consumption only those ideas and thoughts that heal, bless, inspire and strengthen me.”1 119
—Anam Thubten