Quantcast
Channel: Beyond The Dream » vedanta
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 19

The Experience Equation

0
0

Following directly on from my last post, The 3 Levels of Reality and the Walls of our Mental Prison.

Our projections become our ‘reality’. This is caused by mistaking our thoughts for reality. These thoughts are the building block of our constructed reality and form the walls of our mental prison. What tends to cement these walls in place is a simple law: emotion follows thought. When we think painful, negative thoughts, we automatically generate painful, negative emotions. It’s basic cause and effect.

Try it right now. Take a moment to think about something terrible. Imagine something awful happening, or tell yourself that you are a big, fat, ugly loser. Hold that thought for a moment and then see how you feel in your body. What’s your visceral response to that thought? Does your body feel good, or does it feel tight, constricted and uncomfortable? Does the thought generate a positive, happy feeling or emotion, or does it make you feel unhappy, sad or anxious?

Now, brush that off and hold a positive thought in your mind. Imagine something wonderful happening to yourself or your loved ones, and tell yourself that you are a beautiful, talented, deserving and wonderful person. Hold that picture in your mind. Now check in with your body and notice how your body responds to these positive thoughts? Can you feel a sense of loosening and relaxing? Do you feel a warm tingle, or a sense of lightness and ease? Do these thoughts generate happier and more liberating emotions and feelings?

I’m willing to bet that this demonstrates to you the incredible power of thought in creating our emotional and feeling states.

The basic equation of experience is:

Consciousness + thought = experience

Consciousness is a given. Without consciousness, which I’m here defining as the baseline awareness that is forever with us–there is nothing. Consciousness is quite obviously the foundation of our experience, the light by which everything is known to us. While pure consciousness is immutable and unchanging, clearly something is always changing because our experience is never the same from moment to moment. What changes then, is thought.

If you’re still not quite on board with this, then recall our earlier analysis of experience. We don’t, and can’t, experience anything outside of us; outside of consciousness. Everything that we experience is experienced in our own consciousness, for consciousness is the medium by which we perceive and experience, in the same way that you can’t take photographs without film in the camera (in the pre-digital age anyway!).

Our senses relay stimulus, which creates representational images in our mind; thoughts that correspond with the sensory input. Everything that we experience is a thought in our mind. It sure doesn’t feel like that, I know, but there’s no getting around it. The wall I’m staring at across the room is a wall-thought; a representation of wall created in my mind.

To further highlight the interrelationship of thought and experience, consider the fact that everyone experiences things differently. A dozen people can be sitting in the same room, doing the same thing, but each of them are going to have a different experience because each are essentially experiencing their thoughts. The objective is so easily obscured by the subjective and we all tend to buy into what are essentially mind-generated projections.

Back to the cake example—I am given cake, which I then eat. The moment I cast judgement about the cake, whether I deem it good or bad, delicious or the most disgusting baked good I’ve ever come across, I am projecting. My likes and dislikes, which are unconscious, are creating a projection about the cake, a superimposition which I then believe is real. Reality for me becomes “this cake is delicious” or “this cake is disgusting”.

New thought equals new experience

If it’s our thoughts about reality that are actually driving our experience, this implies that in order to change our experience, the quickest and most surefire way to do that is to change our thoughts. A new thought equals a new experience. Thoughts really are that powerful. A single thought can actually change the course of an entire life.

Unfortunately it’s an exhausting and labouring process having to monitor, remove or change every thought that enters our mind. That’s why the positive thinking approach, while correct on one level, isn’t offering a particularly viable solution. Trying to remove or change every thought is like trying to empty the ocean of water or change the composition of h2o. Not only is it an impossible and fruitless task, it’s an unnecessary one. There’s a far more effective way of dealing with our thoughts and projections. And that’s what I’m going to share with you next…



Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 19

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images