Continuation from last week…..
LIVING IN THE NOW
As was suggested earlier in the book and as was shown in Exercise #1, it is entirely possible to separate your state of Universal Consciousness from the state of Mind and Ego. When you do, something curious happens. As you begin to watch your thoughts as an outsider looking in, you begin notice that most of your thoughts are associated with either the past or the future. Yet, if you are to shift your mind to the state of “NOW”, most of your thoughts come to a screeching halt.
While an entire book can be written about this incredibly important concept, we will concentrate on just a few things and their associations with STRESS.
The Past:
As you begin to watch your thoughts, you will immediately notice that about 50% of them are associated with the past. And not in a good way. Typically, the human mind ignores all of the positive past associations while concentrating almost entirely on the negative incidents. The mind tends to zero in on the most painful and the most negative experiences over the last few days, weeks, months and even years in order to create downward energy spirals associated with STRESS.
For example, let’s imagine for a second that you were in an amazing relationship over the last 5 years. It was an incredible experience, yet you ended up fighting over the last few months due to a major lie instigated by the other person. Eventually deciding to split up and go your separate ways. If that is the case, you mind will go over all of the negative aspects of your breakup over the last few months while completely dismissing the previous 5 positive years. That’s how cunning your mind is.
It will focus on how the other person has done you wrong and it will create numerous negative thought spirals associated with it. The range of thoughts you will come up with will vary from mildly entertaining to highly disturbing. Yet, they will all have one thing in common. Even thought your relationship was 99% amazing and 1% negative, the thoughts of the past (in association with your relationship) will be 100% negative.
What’s more, these negative thoughts will bring massive amounts of STRESS into your realm of consciousness. Through two channels. First, your past negative associations will boil your blood. Constantly triggering negative thoughts, feelings and emotions. Second, if you are unaware, you will constantly think about your ex, what they are doing, who they are with, how they could have done you so wrong and so forth.
The same process of negative PAST thought association applies to everything else in your life. Your job, your family, your friends, etc….. In reality, it’s all rubbish, created entirely by your mind.
The Future:
The future thoughts represent the other 50% of your thoughts and work in a very similar fashion. With one primary difference. Your future thoughts are not related to any past events, relationships, friendships, jobs, etc….. They are based entirely on HOPE and WORRY/FEAR.
The human mind tends to take past experiences and project them well into the future. The problem is, the future never turns out exactly as we expect it to. And that brings a tremendous amount of stress into your present state of consciousness.
For instance, a typical negative FUTURE thought spiral can develop in the following fashion. “If I don’t pass this test tomorrow I will fail the class, if I fail the class I won’t get into Harvard, if I won’t get into Harvard my parents will disown me, if my parents disown me they will take away all of my money and they will kick me out, if they kick me out I will be homeless, etc…..”. While an extreme example, it shows, once again, how cunning the mind can be.
In reality, you passing or failing any given test is likely to have very little impact on your overall life. Yet, your mind will create a delusion that it will. Bringing enormous amounts of negative STRESS energies associated with it along for the ride.
To Be Continued Tomorrow……. (Why Am I Seeing This On A Financial Website?)
