Basic privilege and principle
In what I found in the thoughts(?!) of Napoleon Hill about achieving success the basic idea seems to be that if you are able to control your thoughts, your mind, you can control everything, anything.
And somehow until now I am not able to control my thoughts, even though I know that is very important and even though it is high on my priority list and even though I think(!?) a lot about it.
But why should and would I like to control my thoughts? And why is it such an important issue in the Principles of Success? Well, I guess because most humans, or maybe even all, are kind of haunted by negative thoughts, which creates negative feelings and emotions which in the end creates negative outcomes in the real world.
Thinking
And the basic thing is something like “I think. Therefore I am” as Descartes stated a long, long time ago. And somehow this is true and somehow it’s not, as I presume a stone does not think, but it still is. Or not? Or is it only in the eye of the observer that things exist? Isn’t that what quantum physics says, that ‘things’ only exist if there is an observer. And that if there is no observer there are only waves, there is only energy?
But yes, somehow thinking makes humans unique and makes something like ‘consciousness’ exists. And indeed, somehow everything starts with a ‘thought’. In the end things only even exist because someone is ‘thinking’.
How to change your thinking
So how to change your thinking, of course only if it’s negative, but somehow it seems like that for most of us, or most of the time for most of us.
Well, some suggestions we found are:
- Meditate daily. According dr. Steve McSwain this is a must in order to control our thoughts. And if we believe we can’t meditate, that meditation doesn’t work, that’s the first thought we need to change as it’s not true, as most or all thoughts are not true (limiting beliefs).
- Observe your thoughts. And observing means just look at them in a neutral way, don’t judge them. I was once taught that humans are judging machines and they are. Like dividing everything in right and wrong. But right and wrong don’t exist, right and wrong thoughts don’t exist. They’re just thoughts, just things passing by. And it’s our judgment system that’s giving them a value, but that’s no more than “I presume this works because I was taught so or because I had an experience or experiences confirming it works or it’s good for me” or “I presume this doesn’t work because I was taught or because I had an experience or experiences it doesn’t work or it’s bad for me”. So just be the observer, nothing more, nothing less.
- Cultivate the space between thoughts. When you start observing and cultivating the space between thoughts you may notice that in that space is the place of “internal peace”. As we are not our thoughts, we are not even the observer. And this is supposedly the core error of our human experience: that we identify ourselves with our thoughts.
And the main problem of our western world seems to be that we don’t know how to think, or actually not knowing how not to think.
Practice
Well, the moment I’m writing this, the moment I started this page, actually I could not sleep and realized I was keeping thinking thoughts, negative thoughts, thoughts about the problems in my life, thought about my kind of desperate financial situation, thoughts about the journey I want to make and can’t connect to because it seems too impossible, too far away, unreachable from where I am now, at least too far. And the car I want to have, which I also can’t imagine as I think I ‘should’ in order to get it.
So all limiting thoughts, negative thoughts.
References
References for this articles are:
This page was created by Guus on December 3, 2013.