Be careful what you think...
Recently, I have been noticing how many people create their own suffering through their tendency to catastrophise. This means that they imagine the worst possible outcome of an action or event, thinking about it as being a catastrophe or having a potentially catastrophic outcome, without having any concrete evidence to suggest that this is the reality of a situation.
This is often what feeds our anxiety - worrying about things that haven’t actually happened, but we imagine might happen, and we will seek evidence to suggest that these things will happen, whatever they are, in the future, that will somehow cause us pain and suffering. It’s kind of ironic because we create our pain and suffering simply by catastrophising and by thinking in a way that promotes anxiety and negativity (that is, believing our thoughts are real).
I’ve seen this in action, clients self-sabotaging new relationships because they catastrophise about what could happen, so stop themselves going there in the first place. I’ve also seen students completely ungrounded and destabilised because of reading too much material about ‘end of the world’ conspiracy stuff, without any actual evidence to suggest that what is being suggested is actually going to take place.
It doesn’t help that much of the spiritualism conspiracy movement is currently obsessed about the soul being taken away or controlled by the new world order, and yet the irony being that many of the people buying into this notion are creating their own soul separation and are caught in the mind and all its various imaginings.
In essence we are just soul. But we are mostly ignorant to it and mainly identify with the mind instead. The soul is eternal, it cannot be taken away from us or controlled. but as for the mind? Sure, we can be brainwashed, I mean look how brainwashed we are by media, let alone conventional thinking and societal, educational and cultural conditioning. We can easily lose our mind to all this.
We have to be careful how we create our anxiety. My yoga teacher always says, if something is agitating the mind, it is best to stay away from it. So it is with media or conspiracy theory or anyone’s opinions or notions or imaginings that somehow agitate us. We should know this from Covid, the panic and drama that accompanied this, always worst case scenario to the extent that some people stopped living as their fear was so great.
I don’t really look at the news, not because I don’t care, but because me reading it and getting upset about say the suffering in Ukraine is not going to positively change things, it’s just going to agitate me and put me into a more negative spin, which will have a negative effect on all those around me, and because I’ll be in a more negative spin, I’ll attract more of it into my life that day, by he very nature of the law of attraction.
And this is what concerns me about all this catastrophising and conspiracy theorising especially if its done in the name of the soul, because it’s really helping no one, which seems completely at odds with soul expansion and heart opening. You see we create our reality based on the thoughts we think and if too many people are thinking negative ‘end of world, soul being take thoughts’ then they will collectively create more of that in the world.
As Freddy Silva writes, “As one note in the chorus of creation, the human being is special. Its thoughts become sounds, sounds become words, words generate actions, and coupled with intent, actions manifest all manner of consequences. This makes every one of us responsible and accountable for what we manifest. Fifteen centuries of European history teaches us that if a greater mass of people hold an overly pessimistic image of the future, chances are that image will manifest as reality. Apocalypses are seldom the result of predictions and more the release of pathological behaviour in society which creates the situation in the end (Wall and Ferguson 1998). Humanity’s war record of teh twentieth century alone is reason enough to want to change, but to achieve it we must first overcome the cultural illusion that we are somehow separate from the Creative Spirit.
For more than six thousand years, Eastern and pagan mysticism have shown that we cannot connect with Spirit through our very own antenna, the human body. Through the simple act of pressing the palms together, fingertip to fingertip, we adopt the pose in countless sculptures of figures frozen in the act of praying, a ritual instinctively practiced a billion times every day throughout the world, without many of its participants being aware that it is an action far beyond a call to prayer: By pressing the palms you are activating an electronic system which connects you with teh Onesness of creation and allows you, as a part of that Oneness, to intercede upon your own behalf through your thoughts. As the saying goes, “You have the whole world in your hands”.
I really wish that we would remember this. That every moment we have a choice about how we relate to Spirit and to soul and often it is not that anyone is taking that away from us, but we are limiting ourselves in our connection to it by filling our minds with triviality and media litter. We have a choice about how we spend our time and the environment in which we rest our mind - online or in nature? It’s always a choice.
We’re often repeating the same narrative fed to us by media, whether that be mainstream or alternative. I’ve been reading a book about the secrets of the fields and the mysticism of crop circles, and in there appeared this wonderful quote which you might think was written now…
“Preceding these energy shifts and changes are times of confusion and apparent self-destruction, and few will doubt that we are now living in turbulent times. Gregg Braden sees this as one indicator of a vibratory shift:
“Some individuals feel it rippling throughout every cell in their body, perceiving that time, and their lives, are speeding up. Others are experiencing a new kind of confusion, as if nothing in their lives fits any longer…the systems that provide the infrastructure to life and society, inclusive of personal systems such as health, read cycle or not, one fact remains. Within a relatively short period of human historfinance and relationships, are in a state of dynamic flux. …Whether you believe in the near-term close of a great cycle or not, one fact remains. Within a relatively short period of human history, regardless of your age, you have witnessed events that rocked the very foundations of who and what you believe your world is about” (Braden 1993) as quoted from Secrets in the Field by Freddy Silva.
Yes, that’s right! That quote was from 1993! But reading it we could think it was just yesterday. And this is partly what I mean. We’re constantly saying the same thing, because we seem to forget that life on Planet Earth is in a constant state of dynamic flux. Always we are trying to make it certain and known, but by its very nature it simply can’t be. But nonetheless we put in all these societal structures and ways of being to make us feel as if it is constant and known. Then say Covid-19 comes in, or a natural disaster and we’re thrown into disarray and try to make sense of it, to understand how it is that we lost the stability of life on Planet Earth, without appreciating that this is how it is - we never really know what’s going to come next, despite our best efforts.
We live this reality daily, because it is reflective of the battle between the head and the heart. The head wants everything known and certain, so it bases its analysis on what has happened previously, keeping us therefore trapped in the past and what’s been…parents will often raise their children as they were raised because they know that that kept them safe, even if it stifled their soul in some way and does the same to their children, but they don’t question it, because, well, it’s known, it’s what’s done, it’s conventional thinking in action.
The heart however isn’t beholden to the same need for safety as the mind. The heart likes adventure and taking us into unknown territory, of possibility, beyond the limitations of the mind. There is no certainty when we follow the heart, only a sense that if we don’t, well the heart will be suppressed, depressed, unhappy somehow and we will never be able to rest easily, not really, we might convince ourselves that life can be lived easily without the input of the heart, but we tend to have to numb ourselves somehow from the pain of separation that this creates.
This then brings us all the way back to the thoughts we think. Our reality is exactly a reflection of this. And that’s what I love yoga and Reiki, because they help to expand our mind so that we see things differently and think differently in the process, so that we let go of outdated ways of thinking or negative patterning that keeps us limited and trapped in conventional thinking. It’s not easy. The mind and it’s ego identification does not like being slowly annihilated so that the mind can be opened and expanded, but of course the mind needs to let go to be able to expand into new territory. The break down is not always pleasant, but a necessary process for our spiritual growth.
But what kind of world are we trying to create? As love is the foundation of the universe, it seems to me that if we could all drop deeper into love for Self then we might start to create more of this vibration in the outer world too. Imagine a world of love! Like the ancients we too can learn a lot from nature. Nature nows only unconditional love. Look how it gifts us the breath for free, all we have to do is receive it. Yet we have a very tricky time living unconditionally. We are always at odds, trying to pop in conditions, just in case…
It’s one to ponder, not only how we relate to our Self but how we relate to others. Also to watch our thoughts and our tendency towards negativity and neutralising anything positive. And as for catastophising, it’s worth watching that too. Seeing how we’re all individually adding to the collective dream around end of world and end of soul neurosis. maybe then we might ease the collective anxiety that seems to be pervading our society, as if this too, anxiety, has become a pandemic all of its own and this…because we struggle with the transitory and dynamic flux nature of life on Planet Earth.
The key is to keep going within and connecting with our centre and our own nature and appreciating that all is in flux and being able to flow with this, noticing our thoughts and the manner in which these create our suffering. It helps enormously to connect with nature too, to get outside, amongst the trees and bathing in their energy and consciousness, or on the beach, anywhere that brings us back to earth and calms our entire system. And really we also need to shift from being egocentric to cosmocentric - creating a vision of reality that places the emphasis in the universe or nature, as opposed to the view that focuses on humankind as the most important element of existence. Maybe then we’ll realise more of the eternal nature of the soul.
