The most valuable lessons
I have ever learned in my life!
"Life gets awesome
when you make up your mind
to perceive it as awesome."
-- Karen Salmansohn
[Classic post from 9-9-16]
This valuable lesson is about choice, and a choice is a multidimensional thing to me. There is, what we might call in current medical terminology, the 'pre-choice' phase, then the mental testing phase, the choice itself, and the results, or the exit interview phase.
Recently, I've been tip-toeing back through parts of A Course in Miracles, and just the other day underlined some passages that I found fascinating. It is in the first section in a sub-section on Fear and Conflict:
"You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think. The truth is that you are responsible for what you think because it is only at this level that you can exercise choice. What you do comes from what you think. You cannot separate yourself from the truth by "giving" autonomy to behavior."
What was really interesting to me is that this morning I printed out a number of quotes that I receive every day, and it was as if they lined up perfectly with what I had in mind to share. Here's a couple of them:
"Within the seed of your desire is everything necessary for it to blossom to fulfillment. And Law of Attraction is the engine that does the work. Your work is just to give it a fertile growing place in order to expand." -- Abraham, Esther Hicks
"The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outside conditions." -- Robert Louis Stevenson
Yesterday, I was standing in the carport outside my office looking on the courtyard, feeling the magical breeze, hearing my favorite wind chime with its soft, clear, perfectly tuned tones with all its overtones, holding little Charlie, my dog so that he could enjoy it too. I said to Charlie, "This is heaven. This is heaven on earth. Yes, Charlie, we're in heaven right now." Yes, it's true. I actually did say that aloud.
Have you ever felt that way? I used to have to go on a long trip to some other place like Hawaii or something to feel like that, but now, something has changed inside me and I don't have to go anywhere at all to feel it. It is right where I am, wherever I am, as I choose to allow that feeling within me, and my feeling comes from my thoughts, and when my thoughts feel good, I am in alignment with my greater, inner Source of All That Is.
The quote said, "You may believe that you are responsible for what you do, but not for what you think," but it is the thinking that creates the possibility of choice and the choice will create the doing. Sometimes we want to escape where we are to go to a place we think will be so much better, only to realize that we brought ourselves with us. In other words, we bring our thinking with us, and our creations are from our thinking.
Now, I know that a change of venue can influence our thought. Tony Robbins calls that a "change of state." It isn't the doing that controls, but the doing can be a temporary influence, opening the door to a more permanent change in thinking. More often, of course, it is our thinking that creates our state, as in how being depressed, feeling sorry for ourselves, has our physical body in a certain state, and then merely by immediately and grandly changing that physical state of our body, we can immediately influence the thoughts. I've done a demonstration of that in training classes I've done. But just changing the state, or the location is not enough for it to last. We have to get to the real cause in the cause and effect loop: the thoughts. They are infinitely more important.
As Robert Stevenson said, "the habit of being happy enables. . ." Like Karen 'Not Salmon' Salmansohn says, "Life gets awesome when you make up your mind to perceive it as awesome." It is a choice of thought, a decision, a way of seeing something that may not have otherwise been seen, as in my 'heaven on earth' thoughts.
We get to choose every moment of every day how we will think, and what our thoughts will be and thereby what we will create within us and without us. As A Course in Miracles, points out, "Few appreciate the real power of the mind. . . The mind is very powerful and never loses its creative force. It never sleeps. Every instant it is creating. It is hard to recognize that thought and belief combine into a power surge that can literally move mountains. . . There are no idle thoughts. All thinking produces form at some level."
I've Made Up My Mind To Perceive It As Awesome!
Spread Some Joy Today--How many levels of joy do you suppose there are? Hmmm. Interesting idea. Sounds like fun to try them out one by one!
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