Your entire life is made up of one fleeting experience after another. Some experiences feel clearly apart from you. You experience a thunderstorm, the flu, or a mosquito bite, and those things are obviously not “you”; they are only what happens around, within, or to you.
Other experiences feel more internal; the line between them and you seem less clear. The thoughts that run through your mind, the emotions you feel, and the urges you dismiss or obey are experiences you are having as well. They are no more “you” than a thunderstorm or mosquito bite, although they can feel like “you,” because they appear to occur within you. Still, “you” are the witness to all that you experience, inside and out. Everything you experience is temporary. You are not it, it is not you, and none of it lasts very long. It is fleeting; by the time you notice it, it is already changing.
This steady stream of experience that makes up your life is like a river. New thoughts, emotions, and other experiences are always flowing toward you and then away. The source of the river is something beyond the psychological, human realm. The nonphysical, spiritual side of life is the source of our physical, human experiences. Water splashes onto the banks of the river at times, but water that comes to shore always returns back to the river. There is a constant ebb and flow, coming from the source and returning to the source. The nature of the river, beneath any surface waves, is calm and clear. The nature of you, beneath any surface waves (thought, emotion, other experience), is also calm and clear, with unending peace of mind and clarity.
Although we bear an extremely wide variety of experiences, they all stem from thought. Everything you experience—from what you feel and see to what you hear and taste—comes to you via your own thinking. In other words, your thinking determines what you experience in each and every moment. You will see that this is true if you look at how personal and subjective our experiences are. No two people see the same movie, hear the same song, or react to any circumstance in life exactly the same way. We experience everything through our own thinking, and then our thinking creates a picture of life that we assume reflects objective reality.
To see this truth in action, notice how your experience changes when your thinking has changed. When you’re sitting around the dinner table and your sister tells a detailed story about a vengeful waiter spitting in a patron’s meal, the next bite you take suddenly isn’t as delicious. The food didn’t change, but your thinking created a different experience of it. Or imagine you’re engrossed in a movie, just beginning to tear up as the lovable hero lies dying, and a cell phone rings behind you. Your thinking immediately shifts. You are reminded that it is only a movie, and the emotion you were feeling so strongly isn’t the same. We don’t directly experience any kind of external “reality”; rather, we take in sensory information from the world around us and our own internal kaleidoscope uses it to create a picture that we then call “the way life is.”
This is how it is that every person who ever walked the earth has his or her own unique version of reality. The dreams we have at night provide an excellent metaphor for how our daytime thoughts work. When you dream, it is clear that you are experiencing nothing but your own inner world—an inner world that does not match the outer, physical world. Your mind is projecting a series of images and experiences that appear to you—in your dream state—as reality, while, in the physical world, you are soundly sleeping in your bed. You feel fear, joy, or confusion in your dreams. You see colors and vivid, lifelike images, just as you do in your waking life. You might even wake up with a racing heart, sweating, your legs kicking at imaginary bad guys. It all appears real until you wake up and realize it was just a dream. In that moment, you see that it was entirely created by thought, and the lingering emotions then fade.
Your waking life is created by thought in the same way. Because you’re awake rather than asleep, and because we live in an elaborate world of form centered around the physical things in our environment, it always appears as if your experience is the direct result of the world around you. But although it will usually appear as if your coworker’s rude comment is what made you upset—or falling into your habit again is what made you frustrated—your feelings are never a direct result of what is happening in the outside world. It can’t possibly work that way.
What is true is that you are always thinking, and that as you think, you feel your thinking. Your own steady stream of thought is the only thing you ever directly experience. You can’t feel your coworker’s comment, your habit, or your surroundings directly. You can only feel your thinking about those things. This also means that nothing outside of yourself “makes” you do anything. Triggers don’t make you fall into your habit.
Stressful circumstances don’t make your habit come to the surface. The only thing that can ever make you do your habit is acting on the urge (the thought) to do your habit. The only thing that determines your habitual behaviors is the way you relate to the thoughts that pass through your mind. Isn’t this excellent news? Because nothing outside of you can make you do your habit, there is nothing out there you have to change or avoid. The only change that has to occur for your habit to become a thing of the past is a change in perspective—an insight. New Thought Because the river of thought is always flowing and experience is ever changing, new thought is possible in any moment.
Your entire experience can radically change with a single new thought. We can’t necessarily control our thinking any more than we can control the flow of a river, but we don’t need to. When we see that old thought is constantly being washed away, replaced with new thought, we only have to wait, and our experience will change. Thought simply is. It’s not good, bad, harmful, or helpful; it’s not personal, and it’s not “yours.” It is just thought.
Reprinted with permission: New Harbinger Publications, Inc. copyright © 2016 Amy Johnson, PhD
