(The thought-stream as obstacle to intelligence and peace)
Negative emotions release chemicals in the body that diminish the functioning of the rational part of the brain, making problem solving more difficult. The thought-stream actually undermines intelligent action. You may think this stream of thoughts is how things get done and problems get solved, but it is actually a hindrance. Seeing this is recognizing a very important truth. Even the more positive and neutral stories in the thought-stream are not necessary or useful, although they’re easier to live with:
Moreover, positive thoughts, as much as negative ones, maintain the “I” reflected in the thought-stream, the false self. So, in that sense, positive thoughts about “I,” no matter how true, are not actually so positive.
The difference between a negative story and a positive one is how it makes you feel. You know you have found a positive and true story when you no longer feel tense, upset, or unhappy. A positive and true story brings relaxation and peace.
Life rewards you with peace when you believe the truth or tell the truth. When you don’t do that, you will experience upset, agitation, and a sense of contraction in your body. Life points you to the truth this way.
(The false self, self-images, and how the ego sustains itself)
Does living without involvement in the thought-stream sound dry, unfeeling, and therefore unappealing? If that’s your reaction, you might be addicted to the mind’s drama. People are attached to their familiar stories, and on some level, they enjoy the drama of being stirred up emotionally, even though that doesn’t feel good and isn’t productive. Humans have a very irrational side, which is reflected in the thought-stream. This thought-stream is driven not only by the ego, but by the unconscious mind.
Everyone has many self-images, many of which are limiting and keep them stuck in negative feelings. But why this attachment to self-images, even to negative ones? This attachment is part of the programming that is designed to uphold the illusion of the false self. Self-images, especially negative ones, define the false self and keep it alive. They are the clothing the false self wears. Without this clothing, the false self would not exist, so your ego has no motivation to be rid of negative self-images, even if you do. The ego’s job is to create and maintain the false self through self-images. It accomplishes this by telling stories. If you have a self-image of being someone who messes up, then losing your keys is a perfect opportunity to reinforce that image and remind you, through the thought-stream, of just how inadequate you are. You lost your keys—more proof of your inadequacy!
This is just another fact of life, not proof of your unworthiness. Losing your keys doesn’t mean anything about you. The ego creates a sense of self by making events personal. Events are just events, but the ego makes them all about you: “You lost your keys! How stupid of you!” This is how the ego creates and maintains a sense of being you. But this is a false, limited sense of yourself, not the true you.
self-image may be clumsy, stupid, unattractive, bad, bitchy, selfish, or any other adjective you can come up with, but you can never be any of those things. Each of those words is a story about an image of you, not you. You are a most magnificent creation that cannot be captured in words.
(The hero’s nature: true self found in the gap between thoughts)
The transition from ordinary human to superhuman is accomplished, not by a change of clothes, but by a change of perspective. How surprising!
The magical power you have been endowed with is simply the power to choose which thoughts to believe.
In the silence between those few thoughts are found all the qualities of your true nature: courage, perseverance, patience, kindness, compassion, love, peace, and wisdom. Your inner strength—the hero—is found in the space in between your thoughts!
Chapter 3 False Assumptions
Two small words are responsible for a lot of human suffering: could and should. Let’s first take a look at one of these little words that has so much power: could.
The ego lives in a world of “could be,” “should be,” and “might be,” a world divorced from reality, while life is what it is. Anything except what is actually happening now is just a thought about reality, not reality.
Where does this thought-stream come from? Does it speak the truth? Where does the truth about life reside? These are questions you have to answer for yourself. The hero is willing to explore and find out what is really true.
When should shows up in the thought-stream, it indicates a desire for reality to be different than it is: “Life shouldn’t be so hard. He shouldn’t have said that. I should be thinner.” The truth is, wanting life to be different has nothing to do with reality and has little influence on it, except that wanting causes discontentment, and then that becomes your experience of reality.
Should is a direct rejection of reality. It’s like saying no to what is: “No, it should be this way instead. No, he should be this way instead. No, I should be this way instead.” Instead of what? Instead of the way it is, he is, I am—instead of the way things really are.
(Ego’s desires versus true desires; dropping into the present)
When these deeper desires are thought about or expressed, they feel right and good, unlike the ego’s desires, which generally don’t feel good. For instance, the thought “I want a new car” or “I want a relationship” carries a sense of lack and unhappiness, a need for something. That sense of needing something to be happy doesn’t feel good.
There is nothing wrong with following the ego’s desires. In fact, you are meant to, to some extent, because that’s how you learn about life. It’s just that the ego’s desires are not what they seem to be. They are not what makes life be the way it is, although they shape life a little.
When you drop your ideas and desires, you drop into the present moment—into reality—and instantly align with your true nature and become all that you ever wanted to be: complete, happy, at peace, content, wise, and loving. You are already what you want to be!
Every human is endowed with the same flaws and the same virtues. When you can accept that what you are judging or rejecting in someone else is also within you, then you won’t put others out of your heart for that. Have compassion for your own humanity, and you will be able to have compassion and love for everyone else. It’s painful to not love. Look inside and see how you prevent yourself from loving certain people, and that will free you to love, including to love yourself.
(How the ego corrupts the hero’s qualities; withdrawing loyalty from the thought-stream)
The ego often distorts and corrupts the positive qualities of the hero: Strength becomes abuse of power. Endurance becomes rigidity or blind adherence to tradition. Kindness becomes victimhood. Courage becomes foolishness. Peace becomes passivity. Love becomes enabling. Responsibility becomes martyrdom. Reliability becomes stagnation. Surrender becomes submission. Optimism becomes blind faith. Discipline becomes harshness.
The difference between the ego and the hero is the wisdom to apply these positive qualities in just the right measure at just the right time. You could say that life is about learning to do just that. It’s as if you have been given a palette of colors, with the hero’s qualities representing all the colors. Your task is to paint something beautiful rather than bring horror to the world.
The key is simply this: Do not listen to the thought-stream. You are not beholden to it. You do not owe it your loyalty or attention. It is this unexamined loyalty and attention that keeps people captive to negative thoughts, limitation, fear, and every imaginable negative emotion, captive to every story you have ever told about yourself. The price of freedom is to stop being loyal and attentive to the thought-stream. Once you realize that someone is no longer trustworthy, you stop giving that person your loyalty and attention. You stop believing that person.
The Father does not leave you stranded. You have been given a substantial survival kit. How ironic it is that the ego interferes with survival as much as it does, when it was designed for survival. The ego is indeed a survival mechanism.
(Fear of the unknown and the ego’s catastrophizing)
What if not knowing were okay with you? And what if you didn’t assume a negative outcome? This situation, like so many others, may not be in your control, but you are in control of whether or not you are okay with not knowing the outcome and whether or not you assume a negative outcome.
What if you lived one moment at a time instead of jumping into an imaginary future? What if you just stayed here? Is here so bad? And what about now? Is this now so bad? Without a negative thought about the future, there is no problem. Thoughts about the future are the problem.
The fear of change is no small hurdle. The ego is very comfortable with the familiar and uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. When faced with the unknown, the ego automatically imagines the worst. To it, danger is lurking around every corner. And that just isn’t so.
Life is not scary, as the mind presumes, although believing the mind can make you scared. The ego overlooks all the friendly faces, new opportunities, and support that exist in your day-to-day life. Moreover, it overlooks your inborn resources, which can carry you through any experience you could possibly have.
Such stories don’t even help you deal with any danger you do encounter, since they keep you in a state of fear, which is a less effective state than being present.
Knowing that the sense of importance and urgency in such thoughts is manufactured by programming is half the battle. However, you still have to be aware of your negative thoughts moment by moment and be diligent about not paying attention to them. It’s no wonder it can take years once you have seen the truth about your thoughts to actually stop believing them and to live more in the present moment.
(Patience, wisdom, and not taking life personally)
You can only become discouraged if you believe that something should be easier, feel differently, or not take as long as it does. Patience is born from the wisdom of seeing that everything is as it needs to be and takes as long as it takes. Can this moment be any different than it is? Can you be any different than you are in this moment? No. The hero realizes this. This moment is what it is. Your life is what it is right now and can’t be any different. It soon will be different, though, since you continue to evolve and life continues to unfold. Life is in constant motion, always moving on to the next thing, ever-evolving, sometimes in surprising ways.
Your efforts are not as determinant of life as you might like to think. The idea that you create your life singlehandedly is wishful-thinking on the part of the ego. However, although your choices are not what ultimately govern life, they do determine your happiness. The choice of what you give your attention to means everything in terms of your happiness.
Those who are patient are wise about life. They know the truth about life, which is what makes patience and acceptance possible. Impatience, on the other hand, is an indication of being ignorant or resistant to the truth about life.
Wisdom is also knowing that the things that happen to you mean nothing personal about you. If your life isn’t going the way you would like it to, that doesn’t mean you are inadequate or that you did anything wrong. Life doesn’t organize itself just to please your ego. It’s not personal when life doesn’t go your way.
(The Heart as guidance system; following joy over the thought-stream)
This is the Father’s gift and the Father’s
message to you: Love! It is the secret to life.
contracted feeling is a no, while an expanded, joyful, excited feeling is a yes.
The directions from the thought-stream are like that: They take you somewhere but not necessarily where you really want to go. The thought-stream only takes you where your ego or conditioning wants you to go. The trouble is that people assume the thought-stream is something wiser than that. If people believed there was another more trustworthy guidance system, they would use the mind only for what the mind is meant for—providing information and analysis along the way—and leave the “along the way” up to something wiser: the Heart, which is the seat of the divine self in the body.
When things go badly as a of result of following the ego’s guidance, people often blame God, when the Father had a better plan in mind for them all along. This is not to say that there aren’t challenges even when you follow the true guidance system, but those challenges will be specifically designed for your growth, not just to get you back on track. When you are off-course, life erects roadblocks to get you to change course.
The only things that make following your joy difficult are your ideas and fears and other people’s. And yet, what are ideas and fears? They are a faulty map of reality—a map of an imaginary reality.
(Crisis, negative feelings as mirage, and staying in the present)
“I’ll never find love again.” “I’ll be homeless.” “I’ll die.” “I won’t be able to cope.” “I won’t be happy.” The hero doesn’t fall prey to such stories about what might happen. These are imaginations and only waste and scatter one’s energy, just when energy and focus are most needed.
When the ego doesn’t get what it wants or when you lose something or someone dear to you, the ego falls into despair and other negative emotions. It feels powerless and defeated. But these feelings, however real they may seem, are never the truth. They are the false map. They are telling you lies: “You will never be happy again. This is too much to handle. Your life is over. Nothing will ever be right again.”
You are meant to discover this truth about life. Negative feelings are a mirage created by the mind.
If you don’t master these feelings, they will be the master of you, and you’ll have little peace and happiness. If you don’t turn your lemons into lemonade, you’ll be stuck with lemons, stuck in a challenge of your own making. When you are going through a crisis, negativity is an indulgence you cannot afford; there is no room for negative stories, self-pity, hopelessness, fear, guilt, regret, resentment, revenge, or anger. You have to find another way to cope than indulging in these because they will take you down.
But if you give your attention to what is actually real, here and now, and not to any unnecessary thoughts, you will gain access to every resource you need to cope with this moment—which is all you ever need.
The only way any of these moments can be difficult is if your fears and worries make them so.
The mind makes life complicated and unpleasant by fearing, doubting, and obsessing about every possibility and option, while most moments can be handled easily enough without much thought. People think they have to figure out what to do in imagined future moments. But the hero lets the future take care of itself, because he knows the future never actually arrives.
The mind thinks it has to manage every moment or life will go nowhere or fall apart, while quite the opposite is true: The more the mind is involved in trying to manage life, the more complicated and trying life becomes.
It is the voice of self-doubt, hysteria, fear, anger, judgment, and blame. How can it possibly manage your life well?
(Gratitude, emotional mastery, and self-observation through meditation)
The hero learns to feel gratitude throughout the day for the wonderful little things in life that are such a gift and so often taken for granted by the ego. The sun is shining! Deep gratitude. Another day on this amazing planet! Deep gratitude. The birdsong! Deep gratitude. Another day with the beloved dog! Deep gratitude. A good night’s sleep! Deep gratitude.
This is why the hero is able to be so happy and carefree, even under duress, because the truth about life is very good indeed. It couldn’t be better. Life is a celebration of life, or it can be.
They understand so little about emotions that they don’t even realize their emotions can be managed. Believing that emotions can be mastered is the first step of self-mastery.
What the ego overlooks is the price that is paid, not only in bad karma and ill will from others, but also internally—to one’s self-esteem. With every negative emotion the ego nurses inside or expresses hurtfully, it digs itself deeper and deeper into a hole of hate, self-loathing, and worthlessness. When people behave badly, is it any wonder they don’t feel good about themselves?
Self-mastery begins with learning to observe your thoughts. Without a practice of meditation, this is a nearly impossible task, or impossibly slow. I cannot stress this enough. Meditating an hour or more daily will make learning to observe your thoughts much easier and more efficient than trying to do this as you go about your day, which is part of self-mastery as well.
Because the real you is supremely wise and rational, it can see what is true or untrue about a particular thought, which isn’t possible when you are identified with that thought. When you are identified, you are believing the thought unquestioningly.